


nothing as it seems

by josiebelladonna



Category: Bandom, Green River (Band), Mother Love Bone, Pearl Jam
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Art, Art School, Best Friends, Childhood Friends, Coming of Age, F/M, First Kiss, First Love, First Time, Flashbacks, Fluff and Humor, Forbidden Love, Growing Up Together, High School, Middle School, Opposites Attract, Peeping, People Watching, Platonic Romance, Protective Parents, Religious Conflict, Romance, School Dances, Teen Romance, Watching Someone Sleep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-08
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:54:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 37
Words: 40,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23062783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josiebelladonna/pseuds/josiebelladonna
Summary: Sierra Roseburg and Jeff Ament grew up together in rural Montana with a mutual love of art, but neither of their parents approved of their kid hanging out with the other. The feeling only picks up when they find out the university is ending graphic art and Jeff must leave for the West Coast. Can she stay home while maintaining her friendship with him, or should she leave with him?
Relationships: Jeff Ament/Original Female Character
Comments: 3
Kudos: 5





	1. the phone call

**Author's Note:**

> Continuing the whole "childhood friends with art as a major central theme" feel carried over from my Joey Belladonna fic dreaming of you (which, by the way, you should definitely check out because I'm really proud of that one) but taking us to the majestic world of northern Montana, another place where I have some roots in - I have Blackfoot and Crow Indian blood in me, and the former are located especially around where Jeff's from: Big Sandy and Missoula, Montana.  
> I also considered going to school there when I was a science student, and my family had a road trip up to there and to Yellowstone when I was... 7, I think?
> 
> It's definitely a long time coming with this fic. I've been wanting to write a Pearl Jam story since late summer 2017 after I met Mike McCready (I guess a lot of new PJ stories sprung up around then, too, just by observation of the tags on Wattpad and on Tumblr), but it's all been a manner of when and what it's going to be about 💜
> 
>  _”Don't feel like home, ease a little out.  
>  And all these words alone is nothing like a poem.  
> Putting in, inputting in, don’t feel like methadone  
> A scratching voice all alone is nothing like your baritone.”_  
> -“Nothing As It Seems”, Pearl Jam

The phone rang as Sierra unlocked her apartment door and pushed it open before her. She clutched onto the keys as the door closed behind her. She set them as well as her purse down on the recliner chair before her and darted into the kitchen to her left to fetch the cordless before the caller hung up. The waves of inky black hair sailed behind her as she rounded the counter top and skidded before the wall. She picked the phone off of the wall, and pressed the button, and brought it to her ear.

"Hello?" she answered in her bold voice.

"Hey, babe."

She knew that voice anywhere. That voice that followed her all throughout school and into college. That voice she longed for on the lonely dark nights when she had no one to speak to. It felt like forever and a day since she heard his crisp voice, be it over the phone or in person. She especially missed him in person, but to hear him here was both a surprise and an elation of the heart.

"Hi—Jeff," she gasped.

"Is—this a bad time?" he sputtered.

"Oh, no! No, I promise."

She felt the warmth blooming across her face. She clasped a hand to her chest and felt her heart pounding inside of her chest.

"Oh, my gosh, I can't believe I'm actually hearing your voice right now." She brought that hand to her smooth pinkish lips.

"I can't believe I still have your number on hand," he confessed, his voice crackling. She knew he was overcome with tears himself. "I was just talkin' to a friend of mine, and putting his number into my addie book, and I found yours at the very back. Remember when I told you I put your number at the back?"

"Yeah, I do. I—I have to admit to you, Jeff. It surprised me that you did that, and now I realize that you did that because—because—"

"Because there was too much time where we couldn't be together, right."

Sierra sniffled; she felt a couple of tears brimming in her eyes.

"Aw, babe, don't cry," Jeff begged her; something rustled on his end.

"I'm trying not to," she insisted, "but it's just—it's just—tears of joy, I would say?"

"Well, if they're of joy, they'll be of euphoria when I tell you I'm playing in a new band now."

"A new band?" she gasped, and she lowered her hand back down to her chest.

"Yeah," he excitedly said. "You oughta come back here to see us. We're called Pearl Jam."

"Wait." She knitted her eyebrows together. "I thought you were in a band called Mother—something."

"Mother Love Bone?"

"That was it, yes!" she declared.

"It's kind of a—a long story there," he confessed, clearing his throat. "I don't really wanna tell you about it over the phone, though. I'm not even supposed to be on the phone right now, either, 'cause stinkin' curfew and whatnot."

"Oh, okay," she assured him. "That's understandable. I mean, you never were the emotional one after all."

"Blame the fact we were surrounded by seven hundred judgmental eyes and the fact I'm the mayor's son."

"Right! Oh! And do you still have that puffy hat Roz gave you?"

"I do!" he answered. "I'm gonna wear it when we hit the stage tomorrow night."

"So—you want me to drive over there?"

"If you can make it. I know you have a job and whatnot. We're playing two nights here in Seattle, tomorrow night and on Sunday."

"I might have to set aside a day to drive, though," she pointed out. "I'll try and make it on Sunday."

"Okay." He fetched up a nervous sigh; something rustled on his end once again. "We'll be playing at the Off Ramp Cafe—do you remember where that is?"

She hesitated for a moment. "Yes? Yes. Yes, I do. You'll be playing there?"

"Yeah. I'll be waiting for you, too." He cleared his throat again. "Well—I think Mike and I will be, I should say."

"Ah, you're gonna bring Mr. Michael with you, too?" she teased him, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

"If he wants, hell yeah. We'll have a couple of brewskies and some Ramones playing for you."

"Okay, cool," she bleated out as she felt the tears well up again.

"You have a good night, okay? Sleep tight for me."

"I will. And you sleep tight for me, too."

"Sierra?"

"Yes?"

"I love you."

"I love you, Jeff."

They hung up at the same time; once she let go of the cordless, she felt a couple of tears run down her cheek from her right eye. She was right about them being tears of joy. He called her all because of a fluke encounter. It reminded her of the fluke encounter that made up their first meeting during their school days.

Sierra turned her head to the doorway to her right and spotted the manilla folder on the top bookshelf. She had forgotten about that folder for so long. She headed out of the kitchen and rounded the recliner to fetch the folder.

She took it off the shelf and examined the stripe of paper tape front cover of it. Written within the tape in neat black marker read:

" **Sierra's studio art final** "

Above that read the scratchy words " **Sierra's AP art final** " which had been crossed out. She doubled back to the love seat next to the recliner and took her seat there. She plunked down the folder on the table before her. She sat there on the couch and gazed at all of those old paintings on the coffee table.

So many memories: that folder was a prime example because she remembered the fact she and Jeff grew up poor together.

So many good times with Bebe, Zero, and Roz. So many encounters... and without either of their parents knowing.


	2. the first day of fifth grade

Sierra caressed the painting on top of the stack, the one with the different shades of blue all piled atop one another. She examined the paint strokes, all of them so thick and lush and bright with that watercolor paint. As cold as ice, as cold as the river's dark back there home in Montana.

It all felt so long ago, as though she was looking into a whole other world. It was sort of a whole other world, having gone through school and became the adult she had grown into at the moment.

She flashed back on that first day of school. That first day in which she was starting her second school year there in Big Sandy.

Big Sandy was one of those extra small Podunk towns in the northern part of Montana, around the base of the Rocky Mountains, within a stone's throw of the Canadian border as all the old folks described it. Seven hundred people and most of them white: Sierra and her parents walked among them with her dad's parents in the lush forest in the outskirts of town. She was born down in Helena, right as the last leaf on the oak tree at the end of the block fell onto the pavement. Apparently her parents had a dream of leaving the city in favor of the wilderness, and thus they left Helena over one summer.

She left behind the old friends she had made in the first few years of elementary school. Something about her dad wanting to be a cowboy of some sort, and her mother wanting to be a cowgirl. Add to this, her grandparents lived out there so she could have them close by in any case whatsoever.

Sierra meanwhile found herself picking up a pencil and doodling on stray pieces of paper: anything she could find she drew on it. There were nothing special, just simple little drawings of things like the scraggly trees outside of her bedroom window and the leaves on the dirty ground.

Winters meanwhile were brutal, and even more so there in the northern part of the state, with the snow relentless on the harsh Arctic winds. All of those memories of sitting in the dark with her parents and her grandparents and nothing more than candles and a single hurricane lantern: one of her favorite nights was always the one when the snow calmed down and the fog rolled in. Her dad cracked the door open to ensure the coast was clear: he then shone a flash light through the barren trees in the front yard, and the blanket of tiny ice crystals on the pitch dark branches glimmered and shone in the bluish white light.

Moreover, she never could tell when the snow showed up, even after having lived in Montana her whole life.

While on a particular day in fourth grade, she made the mistake of walking to the bus stop with just her little blouse and an ankle length denim skirt. It was the middle of April so it made sense to her to go sleeveless. She boarded the bus and spotted a few of the other kids wearing light sweaters of some sort. Sierra sat there in the smooth hard dark green seat with a satisfied smile upon her face. But before they arrived at the school house, she spotted the puffy gray clouds collecting in the otherwise clear blue sky overhead.

By recess, the sky was overcast; by lunchtime, it began to rain. She itched to go home real quick to fetch her windbreaker but time proved against her. She arrived back home once the rain turned into snow; but she couldn't get her warmest, heaviest sweater on faster.

Never again, she swore from that day forth.

Indeed, it snowed again a couple of days later. Never again, she swore. Never, ever again.

That is until the first day of fifth grade and she knew it was going to be a nice day, that crisp Tuesday following Labor Day. She strode along the partially collapsed brick sidewalk towards this new bus stop: she couldn't recall the full details, other than the fact the fifth graders and the sixth graders had to ride from this particular stop. She stood there next to the pole, all by her lonesome, wearing nothing more than a little blue blouse, her fitted jeans with a butterfly embroidered on the thigh, and her little black Chuck Taylors. Her black hair fluttered in the late summer breeze as she turned around to find him walking towards her.

He had already grown a bit but he still had that stubborn childhood tummy lingering on his waist: his lanky legs. His fine hair had grown long, a bit past his shoulders. His dark eyes gaped back at her against his smooth pale skin and the golden morning sun. He wore a red and black basketball jersey and fitted black jeans himself.

“Are you waitin' for the bus?” he asked her.

“Yeah,” she replied as she adjusted the strap on her book bag. “Are you in fifth or sixth grade?”

“Sixth.”

The golden yellow school bus turned the corner up ahead and inched along the narrow street closet towards them.

“I'm Sierra, by the way,” she introduced herself, turning back to him.

“I'm Jeff. Jeff Ament.”

The bus lumbered up to the curb before them; the doors squeaked open and Sierra boarded first. She passed the bus driver to find the bus was almost fully loaded with fifth and sixth graders. There was in fact one seat left near the middle of the bus, and thus she took that one. Jeff, who lingered behind her, happened to hover right above the empty space next to her.

“Is it alright if I sit here?” he asked her.

“Yeah, go ahead,” she answered as she set her book bag on her lap. Once he took his seat next to her, the doors at the front of the bus squeaked closed and they hurtled ahead down the street.

“Are you new?” he asked as he tucked a strand of hair behind his ear.

“Kind of. My parents and I moved here from Helena in the summer after third grade.”

“Well, at least it was over the summer. I can't imagine doing that in the middle of the school year.”

“Well, at least in the middle of the year you can make friends willy-nilly. Like, you know, you can get the kids attention easy.”

He shrugged.

“I can see it kinda sucking, to be honest. You know, you're by yourself and you've got all eyes on you. At least, that's what my dad can't see.”

She didn't expound on that because she had barely met this boy. They remained silent the rest of the way to school, which wasn't for very long because within time the brick school houses sprung up along the barren landscape outside of Sierra's window.

Once they reached the stretch of sidewalk, the kids all filed off of the bus; Jeff rushed off of the bus first, while she had to side step her way down the aisle towards the front door. Sierra stood there on the sidewalk for a moment to watch him hurry into the front double doors as if he had to run to the bathroom extra quick. She wondered about him and in particular why he related that onto her. Maybe there was something there, but she could never figure it out, especially when she made her way to her new classroom.

The room itself from her memory was modest, with all of those cheap wooden desks and cheesy blue chairs. She took the first seat up near the front of the room, right next to a dark skinned brunette girl in a royal blue sundress and with a silver and turquoise bracelet on her right wrist. She lifted her head from her journal to show Sierra a baffled look.

“Oh, was somebody sitting here?” she asked her.

“No,” she replied in a soft tone of voice. “You just kind of—sat down rather quick. I wasn't expecting it.”

“I'm an unexpecting kind of person,” Sierra teased her, which brought a laugh out of her.

“I'm Sierra.”

“Rosalind. I also go by Roz.”

“Roz—I like your bracelet.”

“Thank you,” she said as she closed her journal. “My grandmother made it for me last week as part of good luck for the school year.”

Sierra knitted her eyebrows together and cocked her head to the side. She examined Roz's deep brown eyes, as deep and rich as the earth. She dropped her gaze to her ankles and the silver anklet on her left one.

“Are you Native American?”

“I am, yes! Member of Blackfoot tribe. My last name is Kingfisher, after the little bird.”

“I wish I had a cool name like that. My last name is Roseburg.”

“Well, that's not bad—” Roz was cut off by the arrival of Jeff, who took his seat at Sierra's right. She turned her head to show him a baffled look.

“Hey!” he greeted her.

“Hey!” she returned the favor. “What're you doin' here?”

“This is my class,” he explained as he slung his bag over the back of the chair. “Fifth and sixth grade blended.”

Sierra wasn't sure if she wanted to laugh or cry.


	3. the art class

Roz had an older sister in Jeff's grade, except she was a year older than him. Everyone referred to her as Zero, even though her real name was Violet. She, too, had that rich black hair and those deep brown eyes as rich as the earth.

“Why Zero?” asked Sierra when she found a chance on the way to art class at eleven.

“The number on my hockey jersey and the fact I actually got a zero on my first art project,” she replied with a shrug of her shoulders. Unlike her sister, she wore an oversized pearly white hockey jersey with the number zero on the back, baggy jeans, and fiery red Chuck Taylors. But like her sister, she had on that same silver and turquoise bracelet on her left wrist. Sierra had to laugh at the fact Zero got her name from her grading on her first project, much to where Zero had to laugh herself.

Their art class stood at the end of the hallway within sight of the flat lush green farms across the way. It was another modest room, but lined with low wooden tables arranged into a circle. The first day and the carpet already smelled of acrylic paints and new paper.

Sierra took her seat in the chair closest to the black boards; Roz and Zero took to the left of her in that respective order.

“Let's hope I don't screw this up,” Zero cracked.

“How'd you even get a zero anyways?” another kid next to her asked.

“I don't even remember now,” she admitted with a shrug of her shoulders. Within time, the class filled out: Jeff had taken his seat three over from Zero given they were sixth graders. To Sierra's right stood an empty seat. Roz turned to her with her dark eyebrows raised.

“What do you think the art teacher'll look like this year?” Roz wondered in a near whisper as she adjusted her bracelet.

Sierra shook her head.

“Some kinda stoner looking dude?” she giggled.

“Or a hippie lady who's seen some things, man,” Roz joked, pouting her lip.

“Seen some things, man!” Zero joined in. “Some things and some stuff!”

The three of them laughed, and the classroom door swung open right then.

He was a tall, thin young man with long shaggy dark hair accompanied with lush side burns; his brilliant blue eyes swept over the room. Sierra felt her heart flutter inside of her chest at the very sight of him.

She had to ask for his last name about twice because every time she spoke to him, she forgot what she would say to him. She finally learned his name as Mr. Meyers, much to Zero and Jeff's laughter.

“Sierra—” he called on her to pass out the paints: full sets of small gray tubes of watercolor paints to accompany their white paint palettes.

“Huh?” She felt a rush of blood to her face. It didn't help matters that he showed her a crooked little smirk all the while; even in retrospect, she continued to blush at the very thought. She stood to her feet and hurried over to the counter on the edge of the room. Everything felt like such a blur but she managed to do it somehow.

When she returned to her seat, she realized she had a set without a bottle of that cold cobalt blue. She had the other paints on hand, but none of that rich royal blue that would be perfect for painting water. She lifted her head to look into Jeff's direction, right as he glanced over at her. He had one of that shade of blue.

She turned her head to face Roz and Zero: they both had that same shade of blue on hand. It was like the art gods had skipped her for some reason because she had a crush on Mr. Meyers.

“Alright, gang, we'll start with some of that cobalt blue to practice washes—”

Sierra returned to Roz again, who looked up at her with her eyebrows raised up.

“What's wrong?” she asked.

“I don't have a bottle of that.”

“Oh, my gosh, really?”

But before Roz could reach for her tube, she felt a tap on her shoulder. Jeff had sneaked his way around the room when she wasn't paying attention. He unscrewed his tube and gave it a gentle squeeze: some of that beautiful blue paint oozed out onto the surface of the palette.

“Here—” he offered.

“Thank you,” she told him.

“It's to make up for the way I spoke to you on the bus earlier,” he said, putting the cap back onto the mouth of the tube.

She showed him a smile right as Roz gave her some of her paint as well. Jeff returned to his seat once Meyers' back was turned. Sierra found herself in bit of a pickle now, even as she focused on making washes with the paints she had on hand plus the blue she borrowed from Roz and Jeff.

How could she ever repay them?

That question followed her all the way through the hour, and more so as she walked to the first round of lunch of the year. The cafeteria stood behind the school house, which meant they had to walk outside, and right as the bitter cold Montana wind picked up. It had been a nice morning up to that point, but now Sierra shivered as she strode along the sidewalk towards the cafeteria. Jeff strode behind her and she didn't know he was there.

“Are you cold?” he asked her.

“Huh?” She turned her head to find him pacing up behind her.

“Are you cold?” he asked again.

“I'm freezing,” she replied. Meanwhile, behind them, the Kingfishers bickered about something that probably didn't concern either of them; the former had her hands clasped onto her bare upper arms to keep herself warm. The latter on the other hand, bowed her head and tucked one arm into the sleeve of her jersey to protect her from the winds.

Sierra and Jeff reached the double doors: she held the door for him. The Kingfishers were a little too far behind and thus she let the door close behind her and Jeff.

“I'm such an idiot,” she confessed to him, and once the wind had settled.

“Why?” he asked, perplexed.

“Because I'm an idiot.”

“What—happened back there in art class?”

“Yeah.” Her tone was grave and anxious.

“Really? Hey, sometimes things happen. I'm glad I moved as quick as I did, though.”

“No, I'm talking about what happened with me and Mr. Meyers.”

“Really?” That beckoned a chuckle out of him. “Zero and I thought it was kinda funny, the way you were acting around Mr. Meyers. When he walked into the room, he looked like he should be working at a dance club of some kind, you know?”

“He should get us dancin',” Sierra joked.

“Yeah! Anyways—I've gotta go over here.” He gestured to the line of kids on the far side of the bright lit cafeteria. “Sixth graders and all.”

“Okay—see ya back in class,” was the last thing she told him once Roz and Zero entered the cafeteria right behind her.


	4. meet the father

Even as she kept gazing on at that blue painting, Sierra continued to glean on that memory of the first day of school.

She had kept next to Jeff the rest of the school day, but they never really spoke. Every so often, she glanced over at him next to her and yet she could never speak to him about anything. He was a sixth grader, several months from getting moved over to the next building. If she ever spoke to him, it would have to borrow something.

She peered down at his shoes and his ankles, the former of which appeared a bit scuffed up, even now on the first day of school.

She frowned at the sight of the dirt on his laces and tiny pieces of the fabric peeling off.

On the other hand, Sierra often spoke to Roz right next to her and she figured, by the end of the school day, she had made a new friend in her. She had her hope that she could do the same with Zero.

Have that reliant older sister friend as well as her younger sister.

Once school let out, Sierra had bode Roz good bye before she made her way across the parking lot to her mother's car. Sierra meanwhile pressed onward to the bus posted up at the curb; she climbed onto the bottom step when she felt a tap on her shoulder.

She turned her head to see him right behind her with the gray afternoon sunlight cascading onto his head and his hair.

“Oh, hi!” she declared, and she padded up the steps to the hard grated floor, and past the driver, a middle aged man with sandy hair underneath his navy blue cap and wrapped in a matching jacket. The last thing she noticed about him was the big golden Latin cross dangling around his neck. She took the seat at the front, there across the aisle from the driver. Jeff took the one behind him, right across the aisle from her.

“Hey, Dad, are we gonna go four wheeling in this thing?” he asked the driver.

“Maybe if we have no kids in here and this thing's falling apart,” the driver chuckled. Sierra raised her eyebrows at Jeff and hunkered down in the seat as the breeze picked up again. She had questions right then, even as the rest of the kids boarded the rest of the seats behind her.

She leaned back in the seat with her arms close to her body to keep the warmth within her. Even as she kept her eye on the street ahead, every so often she peered over at Jeff across the aisle. He spoke to the driver the whole trip: they cracked jokes at each other and the driver said a few lines of what felt like wisdom.

The whole trip they spoke over the chatter of the kids behind her, and she could hear them.

Once the bus lumbered up to their stop, Sierra picked up her bag again and slung it over her shoulder. Jeff followed suit but they stood across from each other in those front seats for a brief moment. He gestured to let her off first. She showed him a friendly smile and she padded off of the bus into the chilly afternoon. She walked towards the patch of grass next to the pole to make it look like she was walking onward.

She heard the driver say, “see you at home, buddy” to Jeff and she paused for a moment. She adjusted the strap of her book bag to make it look like she was rummaging through it. Jeff padded across the grass to her.

“The bus driver's your dad?” she asked him once he came within earshot.

“Huh?” The bus roared away from there which left them alone there on the grass.

“The bus driver's your dad?” she repeated.

“Yeah, he's also running to be mayor of Big Sandy, too.”

“Wow!”

“Yeah! But it's because there's not really much else to support my mom, my siblings, and me, though.”

Sierra frowned at that. Jeff shifted his weight right there.

“Yeah, I'm—I'm kinda poor.”

“Wow,” she breathed as she thought back to his lending her his cobalt blue paint. “Wow, I didn't know.”

“It's alright,” he assured her, “—we don't boil our shoes, though.”

“I hope you don't,” she said as she adjusted the straps on her book bag. She peered up at the ceiling

“We do only get like three channels, though.”

“You're so poor you—can't buy a vowel,” she continued with a bit of hesitation.

“Yes!” he replied with a chuckle. “We're so poor that our bologna only has one name.” That brought a laugh out of her.

He began walking across the grass towards the sidewalk again and she followed him.

“I still wanna thank you for the paint in art class earlier, too,” she added.

“Sometimes I just feel a need to share with people,” he explained as he slowed down a bit for her to catch up. “You know, there's only seven hundred of us here. Zero also told me you're still kinda the new girl.”

“Yeah, kinda,” she agreed.

“She also told me she likes you.”

That made Sierra's heart sing right then. But then they fell into silence for a moment before he spoke again.

“My parents are kinda sticks in the mud, though.”

“Why do you say that?” she asked him.

“If my dad or my mom see me with a girl—like you or Zero—the two of us together, they'll probably freak and think we'll be dating each other at some point. We're hardcore church goers, so it's just—it's just part of the belief.”

She thought back to the golden cross around the bus driver's neck.

“But we won't, though,” she insisted.

“Oh, yeah, for sure. And I have never liked that, either. And I told that to Zero like—last year, I think? But they won't think that, though.”

“So—does it mean we have to keep our distance from each other?”

“Not necessarily,” he pointed out, “we can still talk to each other and stuff but they can't see us together, though.”

She gestured to the little house when she recognized the front yard.

“Is this you right here?” he asked her.

“Yeah.”

He pointed down the block at the big dark house on the opposite corner.

“Is that you over there?” she asked him.

“Yeah.”

“Neighbor,” she told him.

“Neighbor!” he echoed. “But like I said, we can't let my parents see each other, though. Zero went with it.”

“I'll go with it, too,” she assured him.

“Alright! I'll see you tomorrow, Sierra. Now go bundle up—I'm getting cold looking at you.”


	5. the house on the corner

Sierra picked up another painting from the stack. This one had finer lines, even with the gratuitous amount of paint all over it. It took her a moment to realize it was the Aments' house, taken from her perspective down the block there at her parents' house. They were nestled in the trees there on the corner.

She examined the paint strokes in the sky, that cold cobalt blue mixed in with dreary gray.

She couldn't exactly recall what time of year it was at that point, but she did recall what she had done after making this painting.

It was after she had finished her history homework and she ducked out of the house to see if Jeff was home or if he had anything to do for himself. She recalled what he had said about the uncertainty of his parents approving their friendship. And yet, she never asked him if she could come over on that particular afternoon. She figured if she had to sneak over to the house to visit him, she would resort to it.

All she could recall from this one was her walking down the sidewalk to make it look as though she was just a regular elementary school girl going to her friend's house. And she was just a regular elementary school girl going to her friend's house.

She padded down the sidewalk and, once she stood at the corner, she peered either way to make sure no cars were coming. But then again, Big Sandy consisted of nothing more than a few hundred people. She ducked across the pavement to the house on the corner, yet once again, she made it look like she was walking onward past the house and the back gate of the chain link fence.

Once she made sure the coast was clear, she lifted the notch on the gate while trying to keep it quiet. Sierra slid into the dirty, dusty backyard and closed the gate behind her. She kept her head bowed as she made her way towards the back of the house.

She caught a glimpse of a woman in the kitchen window before her.

Jeff's mother—Penny? Sierra learned her name at one point.

She had her back to the window and Sierra made out the sight of her taking a pie out of the oven. She licked her lips but then she remembered what she had come to the house for.

She continued on to the side of the house where she heard music.

Curious, she kept going towards the window sill there on the back wall. Once she was underneath it, she noticed she could take a peek inside of the room and examine where that low, flat sounding music emanated from.

Careful not to bring any more attention to herself, she placed her fingers on the edge of the window sill and lifted herself up a bit. She peeked over the window sill into the cozy little room. Jeff sat there on the edge of his bed with a little bright blue bass guitar resting on his lap. The body was shabby with some of the paint peeling off of the front side.

She watched him play at a quick pace, or at least attempting to play at a quick pace.

She was curious right then: she wanted to know what song he was playing and she wanted him to share this with her, Roz, and Zero if and when he had the chance. She shifted her weight to make sure she was still out of sight, but then she spotted a little black cross on the wall over the headboard of his bed.

“Sierra?” She recognized her mother's voice calling from down the block. Her heart raced upon the sound of it. Sierra let go of the window sill and doubled back to the gate. Still keeping her head bowed, she headed back down the street to the house. When she arrived at the doorstep, her mother stood there with her hands on her hips.

“Why were down there?” asked her mother. Sierra paused: she had no idea how to answer that.

“Well, that's the preacher's house—you mustn't trespass on the preacher's house.”

“I was just—seeing if anyone was home,” she explained as she tucked her hands into her jeans pockets.

“Well, like I said, it's not okay to trespass. If you have a friend you want to see, you should tell me or Daddy about it. If they're one of the preacher's kids, you should definitely tell us about it.”

“Why?” asked Sierra.

“Because we're not church goers. We're kind of—I'd say 'worlds apart' from them. Unless we're wanting to go to church, it's hard for us to get on with them.”

She peered over her shoulder to the house down the street.

Worlds apart.


	6. the halloween party

Sierra picked up another painting, one with a little black mark near the top of the paper and right smack in the middle no less. She took a closer look at it to find it was a bat. A bat superimposed over a full moon. She let her eyes drop down to the middle of the paper to find a line of dark trees spread across a cliff of sorts.

She spotted the date in the bottom right corner: _November 1, 1975_.

“Oh, yeah,” she said aloud. She painted this after the Halloween party at school in sixth grade; she remembered the day itself was on a Friday evening following class, right as the sun went down and the cold dry autumnal winds kept at bay for all the kids.

Jeff thought it to be a dance more so than a party, granted the seventh graders had the option to dress for the night, and the event itself was held in the vast cafeteria. At least that was what Sierra overheard him say on the bus to school the week before.

A whole year of riding on the bus and sitting next to him in class and yet she heeded by her mother's words not to make herself known with him. There came a point in September when she wondered if there was in fact any truth to that given Jeff's father was always friendly to her when she boarded the bus.

The janitors had put up a few of the tables to make room for all of the kids: she remembered there was only a few about the clean linoleum floor for the food and boxes of what the yearbook kids called “Halloween grams”, or corsages consisting of frilly orange flowers and tiny candy skulls and ghosts embedded within which cost a couple of bucks.

She recalled there being a game where if someone found ones with the little bats on one side, they would be entered into the costume contest. Sierra went as the Wicked Witch of the West, complete with the green facial make up courtesy of her mother: it wasn't until she arrived there at the cafeteria when she realized she had forgotten her spindly broom stick at home. She had leaned it against the post at the foot of her bed and then neglected to pick it up as she left the house.

Roz meanwhile came as a Depression era lounge singer, donned in a white dress with a line of red roses along the neckline and a corsage of pink roses on her wrist, right above her turquoise bracelet. Zero came as what she called “Roz's date”, with her black and white pinstriped suit and a black fedora atop her rich black hair. She greeted Sierra with a pair of finger guns, and Sierra stuck up her hands.

“Careful, sis, she might get us and our little dog, too,” Roz joked.

“I forgot my broom stick, though,” Sierra confessed with a shrug.

“You oughta find the janitor's broom and use that,” Zero suggested as she rounded Sierra to fetch a trio of Halloween grams for the each of them.

“Or a tree branch?” said Roz with a shrug and a chuckle. Sierra chuckled with her.

There was another girl who had gone as the Wicked Witch, as Zero pointed out to her. She raised an eyebrow at the sight of her as she picked out a gram for herself; as Sierra put on the corsage and adjusted it on her wrist, something dark caught her eye. She took a look down to find the shape of little bats decorated over the flowers. She gasped.

“You got the bats!” Zero declared with a tone of excitement to her voice.

“When's the contest?” asked Sierra. She took a glimpse over at the front doors to see Jeff walking in dressed as Dracula, wrapped in all black plus a black cape lined with dark red satin on the inside and with pale make up painted on his face; she noticed the fake teeth in his mouth as he grinned at a couple of guys on the side of the room.

“In like three minutes,” Zero told her; she gestured over at the side of the room where Jeff and the two other boys met up at. “The lady told me to meet up over there if you've got it.”

“Okay—”

“Good luck, Sierra!” Roz called after her. She held up the skirt of her black dress as she hurried over to the wall.

No sooner had she stood in line to be judged for the costume contest when she noticed the other Wicked Witch next to her with a line of green glitter across the bridge of her nose as well as dark green eye shadow along the skin over her eyes and a smug look upon her face.

She was a little prepubescent girl with a head full of tight woven golden blonde curls underneath the brim of her big floppy black pointed hat. The golden lights in the rafters overhead shone into her luminous blue eyes and made the glitter sparkle like gold. She looked so glamorous and lovely compared to Sierra and the green paint on her face. She sighed through her nose as she let her eyes wander down to the girl's right hand.

Sierra had forgotten her broom stick, but this girl had it with her. Whether or not they went by make up was moot to her at that point. A witch without the broom stick was not a witch in her eye.

At one point, Jeff stepped out from the line of kids and adjusted the cape on his shoulders, and Sierra caught a glimpse of the heavy silver cross around his neck. She remembered what her mother had said about him being the preacher's kid. This little blonde girl in between them only made their being worlds apart even more definitive. Jeff took out his false fangs and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Wicked Witch of the West?” he asked the blonde girl.

“Yeah! My mom told me eye shadow is easier to take off than facial paint—”

Sierra sighed through her nose again. She watched Jeff show the girl a friendly little grin, and she thought back to his friendliness to her and wondered if it meant anything.

“I like how you played around with it,” he complimented her; but then again, Sierra noticed him glimpsing up at her.

“Alright, y'all!” the gym teacher, Mrs. Sanger, declared from the other side of the room, and adjusted the golden crown atop her head. “Let's get going!”

Sierra turned her attention back to Roz and Zero, both of whom had taken chocolate cupcakes with orange frosting for themselves, and proceeded outside with the fading sunlight washing over them. She zoned out for a little bit, that is until she was asked to step forward with the girl, whom she found was named Bebe.

Two Wicked Witches, but which witch was the real one?

She remembered neither of them won anything—the girl dressed as Glinda the Good Witch won the contest. Her pink dress shimmered with glitter in conjunction with the soft blush on her cheeks. But none of it made any difference given she couldn't stop thinking about her mother's words. Maybe her mother just disapproved of Jeff himself. Maybe Jeff's father wouldn't approve of her either.

Either way, it felt so wrong especially after kind he was towards her.

She sighed through her nose again as she swiped a cupcake for herself and headed on out to catch up with the Kingfishers. But then again, as she stepped outside to the cold evening and incoming darkness, they were nowhere to be found. She clutched onto her pointed hat as she made her way to the street and the line of golden lamps.

She caught the sound of The Beatles playing out from the doors of the cafeteria as she ambled onto the sidewalk. Maybe they already went home, but they would have at least said something to her. They had come rather far in their friendship after the year of fifth grade, and thus it made no sense for the Kingfishers to leave without making it known to her first.

Once Sierra arrived at the street, she stopped and sighed through her nose.

Maybe it was losing the contest and the fact she wasn't allowed to see Jeff outside of school. But she bowed her head and closed her eyes as she felt the tears beckoning forth.

“Sierra!”

She lifted her head to see something dark running towards her: using the golden light of the street lamp next to her, she made out the sight of his black and red cape behind him as though he flew towards her. She sniffled but no tears fell from her eyes.

“You dropped this,” he told her, and she showed him a smile as he slid the corsage back onto her wrist. The little plastic bat gleamed under the light of the street lamp. She showed him a smile which made the green paint on her cheeks and her chin crinkle.

“Thank you,” she said in a small voice.

“Also I think your parents are here,” he told her as they returned to the cafeteria. “Like I heard the lady say your name and I knew she wasn't a teacher.”

“Okay,” she said, her voice still small.


	7. the church choir

Sierra set down the Halloween painting so she could examine through some newer paintings and raw sketches. Some of those works she never recalled she made all through art class, although there were a few in which she recalled were collaborations between herself and Roz: there were a couple with Zero's name signed right next to her name.

The works grew more and more refined with each close examination. She held one drawing in her hand that dated from March 1977, about a week or so after Jeff's fourteenth birthday. The drawing was sketchy and rough with soft graphite and taking the shape of two nude bodies pressed against each other.

And then the onslaught of memories returned to her.

At that point in school, she had begun covering up with larger shirts. The whole feeling of growing up hit her and both of the Kingfishers like a truck: poor Roz outgrew all of her sweet little dresses overnight it seemed. And yet she never lost her bracelets or her anklets in the process. Zero often broke out in horrible, painful looking acne, and her playing hockey every other day after school didn't help matters.

And then there was Bebe. The other Wicked Witch. Sierra always referred to her as “the other Wicked Witch” behind closed doors, even after a substitute teacher called her by her real name Beatrix. She couldn't explain it but she always wanted to go forth and rage against the isolated setting there in northern Montana. The long torrid days in the summer time, the long frigid nights in the winter, and of course, those golden curls surfacing every so often.

It also didn't help matters that she still had to refrain from meeting up with Jeff for anything outside of school.

He had always taken his seat across from her there in art class and often gave her a friendly smile if they made eye contact long enough. But she knew there was nothing she could do. She still had bit of a crush on her teacher, but there was nothing she could do about it, especially after she found out he was married. She wondered if it was hopeless for her at the point following that incident following Jeff's birthday.

Sometime near the end of sixth grade, on the weekends, she started stepping outside to the quiet neighborhood to see if there was anything to help clear her mind. She made her way down the block to Jeff's house, where she caught the guttural sound of a bass guitar from his bedroom window. There was a bit of fuzz surrounding the sound and the rhythm rumbled around at a quick pace.

She decided not to follow through on the peeping incident after what her mother had said to her that time. She kept walking down the block towards the Catholic church, the one with the high rising stained glass windows looking out to the street and the lush green fields, and a low pearly white shed. Since she had nothing else to do that day, she wondered what Roz and Zero were doing.

Sierra strode along the sidewalk with her hands tucked in her jeans pockets. It was a pleasant early spring day with the warm midday sun shining down on her head and shoulders, and the cool breeze wanting to billow the tail and sleeves of her shirt, something old that Zero had given her as she wanted more fitted shirts and jeans. Her jet black hair streamed from the side of her head like the tentacles of an octopus. Here she was, looking on at middle school with old clothing on her back and feeling alone.

That is, until she recognized his voice from right behind her.

“Sierra!”

She stopped and turned around to find Jeff hurrying towards her. He was wrapped in a red and golden basketball jersey and had a ball cap atop his long mane of mousy hair: he clasped a hand to the top of his cap to keep it from flying off his head with the breeze. She showed him a smile as he came within earshot.

“Hi—what's up?”

“I saw you walking and I wanted to see if—” He hesitated to clear his throat: he was losing his high pitched childlike voice in favor of a lower, more masculine sounding one. “I wanted to see if you wanted to hang out.”

“My mom doesn't want us hanging out, though,” she confessed.

“Why's that?”

“'Cause you're the preacher's son.”

“So?”

“We're worlds apart.”

He shook his head.

“I don't think we are,” he told her. She shifted her weight right there on the sidewalk. They were both fourteen at that point, and as far as she knew he had never gone out with anyone. As far as she knew anyway.

He tucked his hands into his jeans pockets and pivoted his knee a bit.

“I heard you—playing bass,” she told him.

“You heard me? What'd you think?”

“You're fast. I liked how thick the sound was, too.”

“I was playing around with some different sounds and stuff.”

“For a second, I thought you were gonna say you were playing around with yourself.”

He burst out laughing at that.

“You wanna go over there to the shed so we can have some privacy?” she suggested right then. He lifted his head and followed her gesturing to the low building next to the church.

“Ah, you wanna have a little fun!” he declared.

“Shhhh!” she hissed, and she hurried across the grass to the shed. Jeff followed close behind her: he was fast much like that bass riff she overheard. Sierra ducked around the corner and he skidded up right behind her. She caught the sound of a church choir singing through the door to her right. Panting, he took off his cap and ran his fingers through his hair.

“I can't believe I got beat by a girl,” he teased her. “Then again, it's what the Ramones probably would'a wanted.”

She hardly knew him other than admiring him from afar, but it was running across the grass and leaning her back against the warm brick wall that allowed her to feel open with him. She wore baggy clothes which hid her body from him.

“I want you to kiss me,” she begged him.

“Here?” he stammered, stunned.

“Yes. We're alone here. Please.”

Without hesitating, and without frightening her, Jeff inched in closer to her. He leaned his body closer to hers and bowed his head so his lips were within range. She could smell the rolled oats on his breath and the soapy cologne on his neck.

She relaxed every inch of her body.

He closed his eyes as he hovered right before her lips.

“Jeffrey!”

They both stopped and turned their heads to the right to find Jeff's father, the preacher and the bus driver, leaning out of the door with a scowl over his face.

“Jeffrey Allen Ament! What do you think you're doing?”

“Oh, my gosh, Dad! I—”

“Get in here! Get your butt in here!”

Jeff turned to Sierra and his face bloomed with that rich deep pink of a blush. She covered her chest and she could feel her heart hammering inside of her chest.

“Oh, God,” he sputtered. “I have to go. I'm so sorry.” She watched him hurry to the door to meet up with his father and, even after the door closed behind them, she hung there with her back to the wall and her arms folded over her chest. It was from that moment onward that she wanted Jeff, but as more than just a friend.


	8. the green field, part one

Sierra gazed on at that one drawing, that one drawing of the two nude bodies entwined with each other, and wondered about the context behind it all. That date baffled her: there was something more there but she wasn't sure of it. She leaned back against the couch with the drawing cradled in either hand and examined those scratchy, sketchy graphite lines. It was so rough that it made her think of dried grass. All that dried grass that followed the fresh, crisp green bloom of spring time in the end of summer, when the leaves began turning and painting those warm autumnal colors.

Something happened in the days after the encounter behind the church.

Given it was the middle of March, with the end of winter at hand, it only made sense for the school's hockey team to head into their championship games for the time being. The girls went up first and Zero, who had done as best as she could throughout the winter to ensure her spot on offense, found herself promoted to team captain.

It was later in the day and thus the lights within the encapsulated hockey rink bathed every inch in pure white light. A chill hung within the air over the bleachers, and the ice down below was smooth and pure white save for the blue line and the goal posts.

Sierra remembered a rather large tractor had parked itself in the green field across the way, the same one that she saw outside of the classroom window every day for the past two years: she always saw Roz there next to her with her silver and turquoise and her little dresses, and then beyond her stood that vast stretch of green. She never realized the hockey rink was that close until both the Kingfishers invited her and her parents to their home game.

That was the night she met Roz and Zero's grandmother, this little white haired Blackfoot Indian lady with a clip of bright red feathers on one side of her head and a warm welcoming smile filled with wisdom at the sight of Sierra herself.

“Have you seen Jeff around?” she asked Roz; out of the corner of her eye, she spotted Bebe walking towards the entrance and wearing a little blue jersey.

“I haven't, no,” said Roz, “I did see him earlier today, though. I'll help you out, though. But hang on a second—I've gotta help out Nana here.”

Sierra watched her lead her grandmother down the corridor to the bleachers. And then she felt a tap on her shoulder.

He stood there with a big grin on his youthful face and his hands pressed to his hips. She eyed the cross around his neck, residing there underneath his shirt collar.

“My ears were burning,” he told her as part of her greeting.

“I—wasn't expecting to see you here, though,” she confessed.

“Same here. My dad's getting hot dogs right now.”

“My parents let me go solo,” she pointed out.

“Oh, so you're here alone?” He raised his eyebrows at that.

“No, I came with the Kingfishers.”

Jeff peered behind him to make sure no one was looking on at them.

“Come with me,” he told her in a hushed voice.

“But the game, though!” she insisted.

“Don't worry—it won't start for at least another hour. I promise.”

He guided her back outside, into the darkness, just these two pubescent teenagers heading out through the gates again as though they had forgotten something. Nothing more than the warm, early spring twilight and the street lights guided their way to the far side of the rink: they were met with a light lick of a cool breeze and the stretch of dark green. Sierra spotted the huge tractor there right smack in the middle of the field.

Jeff led her through the darkness towards the tractor: the earth underneath the grass was soft but not marshy as it tended to be following a torrential late winter downpour. Sierra took one final glance over her shoulder to make sure they were alone. He skidded to a stop once they reached the side of the tractor facing away from the rink and faced her. In the dim light, she could make out the faint silhouette of his round face and his soft features.

“I wanted to come out here because it's much more private than the spot behind a Catholic church,” he explained. “Not a spot where my dad or your mom can find us.”

She shifted her weight there on the grass.

“Okay,” she began, “—how are we gonna do this?”

Over the faint cheers behind them, she could hear Jeff swallow hard as though he was nervous.

“Have you had the talk yet?” she asked him, and he slowly shook his head.

“Have you—even been with anyone yet?” she asked him in a lower voice. He shook his head again.

“I've had my eye on Bebe for a little bit,” he confessed, “but she doesn't seem too interested in me, though. She's more interested in playing with her curls.”

“Well—can we sit down at least?”

Gingerly, he took his seat there on the grass in front of the large tire: she watched him stretch out his lanky legs. She squatted down before him as he lifted up his shirt. It was dark: she could hardly see what was happening. She didn't know what to do so she hung there in silence. He hesitated as well: the silence over them was deafening.

And then she felt his lips against her own: smooth to the touch, like silk. His neck and hair both smelled of soft cologne over that pungent aroma from his skin.

“I've always thought we were art,” he confessed to her in a near whisper. “Humans are art.”

“And—I have to agree,” she whispered. She felt his hand on her back but she didn't know what he was doing.

“Sierra? Jeff?” a distant familiar voice caught their ear.

“Who's that?” he asked.

“That sounded like Roz,” she answered.

“Let's go see her—my butt's getting wet anyways.”

She helped him to his feet and they hurried back to the rink, where Roz near the edge of the building with her hands pressed to her hips. Her face lit up when she saw them.

“Oh, there you guys are,” she said as part of her greeting. She hesitated. “What were—the two of you doing out there?”

“I was just showing Sierra that big tractor that's out there,” he replied with haste. Roz chuckled.

“Well—come on, the game's about to start. We're down in front, by the way.”

She led the way back into the rink in time for the teams to take to the ice. Sierra and Jeff lingered behind her; on the way down to the bleachers down before the ice, she could feel his hand brush against her own as if trying to catch her attention. And it wasn't until they took their seats next to Nana Kingfisher when Sierra realized he was trying to hold her hand. It wasn't the best idea given his family were right across the aisle from them and Bebe and her parents were right behind them. The two of them were surrounded and they couldn't be together as they watched the little black puck drop on the ice and Zero soar around the hockey rink in her oversized jersey with her teammates like a horde of ghosts. Sierra wanted to be close to Jeff, even there on puberty's doorstep, and yet it all felt impossible.


	9. the wicked witch

It wasn't until well after the hockey game when Sierra could wring out another opportunity to even so much as hold Jeff's hand, and even then, she had to test the waters a bit. But from her memory's bank, she had to find her way back to him first and had to start from somewhere.

The cheers of the crowd in the bleachers around her still filled her ears as she helped Zero and the other girls lug the championship trophy to the front corridor of the rink. As she gave her dark hair a toss back from her face, she caught the sight of Jeff and his siblings walking to the front doors again. She watched him walk at a slow pace right behind his sister and next to his dad.

The preacher's son with that cross around his neck to affirm that. His gaze swept over the heads of his siblings and then he caught a glimpse of her there at the end of the corridor. Past him was that bouquet of golden curls; she sighed through her nose when it looked as though they stood shoulder to shoulder.

“Sierra? Are you listening?”

Startled, she whirled around to face Zero and the befuddled look on her moonlike face. She looked as though she hadn't been playing for the past few hours: her brown skin had a soft glow to it, and her tied up black hair still looked feathery and coarse.

“Huh? What's happening?” asked Sierra. Zero and a few of the other girls giggled at her.

“You wanna grab something to eat with all of us and Roz and Nana?” Zero suggested.

“It's kinda late, though.”

“It's part of the deal, though.”

“I haven't eaten yet anyway, so—”

“Well, let's get on it! Roz and Nana are waiting for us.”

Sierra followed the girls out of the corridor to the parking lot where a school bus awaited the hockey team; next to that stood a small gray car where Roz awaited them there at the driver's side door. In the dim light, Sierra could tell her body was coming into that hourglass shape underneath her smooth dress.

She grinned at her sister once they came within earshot.

“Good game,” Roz declared.

“PHEW!” Zero exclaimed; she bowed her head forward and shook her hands about even though she hardly broke into a sweat.

“So we're gonna be following the bus?” Sierra asked them.

“Yeah, that's what Nana's gonna do,” Roz explained as she tucked a lock of black hair behind her ear.

“Shotgun!” said Zero as she darted around the front hood of the car.

“You're champ, so you get a pass this time,” Roz quipped as she opened the door behind the driver's seat to make way for Sierra and herself. The interior of the car was cozy, and a bit warm, and smelled of incense and leather.

“So are we going to Denny's?” Nana Kingfisher kindly asked Zero; her long fingers curled around the rim of the steering wheel; in the dim light, Sierra spotted a massive silver and turquoise oval ring on her right middle finger. Something about the darkness gave it a much more sinister appearance.

It was there she realized the power of darkness, not just in real life but in art as well.

“I think we are—” The bus lumbered past them and they followed after out of the parking lot and into the darkness. Sierra thought about Jeff and that space behind the tractor. Maybe when they found an even better opportunity they could kindle things even better. But that was a large “maybe”, and it didn't help matters that this car was taking her in the opposite direction from him.

Within time, the bus parked at the curb behind the quaint, warm lit Denny's where the Kingfishers took one of the spots near the front door. Sierra and Zero helped Nana Kingfisher into the front lobby; they hung there for a moment before the girls joined them there near the cash register.

Sierra ducked into the hallway with the bathrooms, and into the ladies' room. Not that she had to go, but she wanted to have a moment to herself. She padded over the faded stone tiles and halted before the sink basin closest to the door. She rested her hands on the sides of the basin and gazed at herself in the mirror. Her skin still had a bit of clarity to it but she could make out the fledgling marks of new breakouts on the sides of her face; her black hair still looked smooth. Maybe it was all of the interruptions, but something was overcoming her. Or maybe it was that kiss.

It was that kiss.

She ran her tongue along her bottom lip to taste him.

She could still taste him, even as she took a whiff of perfume from the right of her. She turned her head to find those blonde curls next to her. Right next to her.

Bebe tousled her curls a bit for more of that feathery look to go in junction with her denim vest and matching jeans. Her metal hoop bracelets jingled as she moved a bit of her bangs to the side. She paused when she noticed Sierra was looking at her through the reflection in the mirror.

“I see you all the time at school but I never caught your name, though,” she confessed.

“Sierra. You're Bebe, right?”

“Yeah. You're friends with the Kingfishers, aren't you?”

“Of course. They've been kind to me since fifth grade.”

Bebe knitted her eyebrows together.

“Are you new?”

“Kinda.”

“Are you that same girl in fifth grade art class who was kinda—I wanna say klutzy in front of the teacher?”

“Yeah,” said Sierra in a low voice.

“And then Jeff gave you some of his paint, too?”

“Yeah.”

“He's sweet, isn't he?”

“He is.”

“He's lent me some pencils and some paints, too, but not so much anymore, though. He's so generous to girls he likes.”

The door swung open and Jeff himself caught himself there at the doorway.

“Oh, hey! I thought this was the boys' room.”

“Maybe it is,” Sierra teased him as she released her grip from the sink basin.

“Besides, what're you even doing here?” asked Bebe as she flicked a strand of blonde hair from her brow.

“There's a big groovy party here,” he answered, “I pointed it out to my dad and it was something he couldn't refuse.”

“Funny, that's the same reason the two of us are here,” Sierra pointed out.

“Groovy party just got groovier!” he declared as he raised his hands up as if raising the roof.

“Besides you're still in the ladies' room!” Bebe exclaimed without missing a beat, and that brought a laugh out of both Sierra and Jeff. He ducked back out of the bathroom and into the hallway. Bebe fixed her bracelets and flashed Sierra a genuine grin in the mirror's reflection before she headed out of there herself.

Maybe the Wicked Witch wasn't so wicked after all.


	10. the invitation

Sierra shuffled through some more of the drawings there on the table before her. She tried to recall the first time she and Jeff had a closer encounter with each other, one that took things a step further from their first moment there on the grass behind the tractor.

Every walk through the school hallway, every passing by in the courtyard towards the cafeteria, and every insurgence of hormones with the passing day through middle school. She wanted it with him, especially when they all entered high school. Even though Jeff still sought out an interest in the arts, Sierra found him vouching more and more into the sporty side of things. She still recalled the day it was announced he would participate in both the football team and track and field.

Zero meanwhile found herself more in the captain position of the girls' hockey team. Over the course of a year, she had gone from the runt of the team with the number zero gaping on her back underneath her long black hair as it streamed behind her, to the most powerful position.

Then there was the one day Roz walked into class wearing denim jeans hugging her hips. Sierra still recalled the shock at the sight of them, especially at the legs as they fanned out from her ankles. She had a ropey tie belt around her waist as well to bring attention to her shapely narrow hips.

Sierra was watching herself as well as her friends grow up together.

But then there were all the times she strode past the Catholic church on those sunny, warm spring days. The preacher's son, not allowed to step anywhere near her or even so much as look at her. It almost became agonizing once they entered high school and she stared at sixteen in the face having only a near miss of Jeff's lips to her name.

She wanted to disobey that distance between them, especially when she caught Bebe in the girls' bathroom applying make up onto her face.

Those golden regal ringlets shone under the bathroom lights like a crown as Sierra strode in there to wash her hands.

“Hey, you,” Bebe greeted her with a glossy smile and a kiss of perfume on the side of her neck.

“Hey, lady,” Sierra retorted. Bebe gave her hair a gentle toss back with a flick of her head: it was as if she had threads of sterling silver embedded in those ringlets. Her chest pointed out like the one on a doll, except she had that little smidging of soft gloss on her lips and a gentle blush upon her cheeks. Sierra copied her movements as she gave her black hair a toss back from her shoulders with a flick of her head and poked her small but defined chest out. She was so slender compared to all of the other teenage girls, there came a time in which she believed puberty skipped her for the most part and applied itself onto everyone else.

“Head back, boobs out,” Bebe remarked.

“I can't do it like you, though,” Sierra confessed.

“You do have a booty coming in, though,” Bebe pointed out. Sierra couldn't crane her neck back to examine her rear end but she took her word for it.

Zero strode into the bathroom right then wrapped in her hockey jersey and with her black hair piled atop her head in a messy bun the size of her fist.

“Hey, Zero, wouldn't you agree that Sierra's got a nice butt coming in?” asked Bebe. Zero and Sierra both hesitated right there as the former checked her out.

“She does, Beebs! I'm sure Jeff would like to have a moment alone with you, Sierra,” Zero teased her.

“You sure about that?” Sierra retorted.

“Positive. Sierra, take this from me.” Zero posted up right there at the sink between her and Bebe, but she gazed into their reflections as opposed to facing them head on. “Boys who go into a bunch of sports like he does are full of testosterone. He's going nuts with all of the playing at the moment because he can't seem to catch a break.”

“Oh. Oh, really?”

“Yeah. I haven't spoken to him, but it wouldn't surprise me. That's just from what I've seen from watching the boys change their clothes in the locker room before practice.”

“You should ask him out to the Sadie Hawkins dance,” Bebe suggested as she twirled a ringlet around her finger.

“Oh, yeah! That's coming up here!” Zero recalled. She then turned her head for a look over at the nervous Sierra. “I'll try and flag him down for you if you'd like. It's up to you, Sierra.”

On one hand, she had only had two other encounters with Jeff but neither of them went too well. But on the other hand, she was about to turn sixteen and she had no other boys looking at her at the moment.

“I'll do it,” she finally said.

“Alright!” Zero raised her hand for her to give a high five. “I have practice today so hang around after school so you can ask him.”

Indeed, Sierra did not board the bus back home and she would have to fabricate some kind of story to her parents lest they find out she was about to go out with the preacher's son. She hung around the outside of the cafeteria in awaiting Zero and Jeff. It was a chilly November afternoon as the sun began to hang low over the horizon; she knew it would snow again soon and she had neglected to bring a jacket again granted the day started out warm. She adjusted the strap on her courier bag and glanced about for any sign of them.

She was alone in the courtyard.

She wondered if she had made a horrible mistake when she caught the sound of Jeff's voice to her right. Sierra turned her head to find him walking towards her, by himself.

“Hey, Jeff,” she replied to him once he came within earshot. “Where's Zero?”

“She's at practice,” he answered, “and my coach called in sick so I have it off today. I heard you wanna take me to the Turnabout?”

Sierra nibbled on her bottom lip and put her arms behind her back. She also lifted her head to bring more attention to her neck and collar bones. Head back, boobs out, just how Bebe had said.

“I do, yes,” she told him. “That is if—you know. It's alright.”

“It's on the fifteenth, right?” he recalled with a sly grin upon his face.

“Yes, it is. Couple of weeks away, so plenty of time to plan.”

He nodded his head.

“I think I can do it.” For a second, she swore he winked at her. “I'll wear my nice suit.”

“I'll wear a cute little dress,” she retorted.

A car pulled up to the curb behind them.

“That's my ride,” he told her, “I called my mom and told her what was up.” He paused for a moment. “Would you like a ride?”

“Please,” she said, and she dared not tell his mother about what had happened there. If she was to keep a secret for as long as she could, she would.


	11. behind the bleachers

Sierra recalled it was bit of a christening of sorts when she turned sixteen. She hit that milestone of having not pressed her lips to those of any boy in Big Sandy. And yet she had Sadie Hawkins before her and she knew that would change what with Jeff there with her and whatnot.

She had met up with Bebe and the Kingfishers at her front doorstep: she wore this little black dress with a little accompanying knit sweater. She had on these little black slippers; Zero made a joke about how she looked as though she was about to attend a funeral.

Roz then followed it up with, “we put the 'fun' in funeral, sis” which brought a laugh out of Bebe.

There was one splash of color on Sierra's ensemble and that was the little red rose clipped onto her waist. Bebe herself put on this long pink dress and a smudging of rose colored eye shadow to make her bright eyes pop even more. Roz wore a denim skirt down to her ankles and of course that anklet she had had since the fifth grade, and a light black cardigan.

This was also the first time Sierra ever saw Zero in a dress: she had tied her black hair into a tight braid behind her head and put on a felt dress with off the shoulder sleeves. She, too, had on those silver and turquoise anklets to match up with her younger sister.

Sierra and her best friends were growing up, and they were about to grow up even more when she led them to the house down the street to pick up Jeff. The three of them hid out behind the fence to remain out of sight as she opened the gate and crept across the yard. She remembered the place she had been before with that back window.

Despite it being the middle of November, he had the window open which allowed her to tap on the pane with the tip of her finger.

Silence except for the breeze fluttering over the bushes behind her.

Then the window slid open and he poked his head out. His light hair fluttered with the movement and from the breeze around them.

“Hey,” he greeted her with a smile.

“Hi—are you ready?”

“Born ready.”

She stood back as he put one foot up on the window sill: despite his nice jacket and button up silk shirt fitting to his slim body, he still wore black Chuck Taylors. Sierra spotted the Ramones button on the lapel once he had climbed out and closed the window behind him.

“Alright, let's go,” he coaxed her as he straightened out his jacket.

“Bebe and the Kingfishers are waiting for us,” she told him in a hushed voice. They ducked out from the side of the house there back to the gate.

“Bebe and the Kingfishers—that sounds like a band name,” he joked as they sneaked off of the property and into the incoming evening. She giggled at that as they rounded the fence to find the girls congregated there awaiting them.

They walked together towards the school with Zero leading the way. In the dim light, Sierra noticed her holding her skirt up even though the bottom was a ways off from dragging on the sidewalk. About a block away from the school, she felt his hand brushing against hers. She looked down at her waist and held onto it: his fingers were rough with calluses from bass playing and throwing a football around, but she didn't mind in the least. She finally got to hold Jeff's hand as they walked up to the gym doors with the violet twilight painting the sky overhead beginning to give way to the darkness of night.

They stepped into the bustling bright colored cafeteria as the sound of KC Sunshine blared out over the speakers before them. The end of the decade was here and now was the time to party. Roz and Zero disappeared into the crowd and Bebe stopped to speak to someone off to the side. Jeff then stepped ahead of Sierra to guide her to the dance floor.

She didn't know how to dance but he was the one with the rhythm so she followed his lead. He twirled her a bit and held her close to him.

She let her hand glide down the small of his back onto the seat of his jeans. He nibbled on his bottom lip as her fingers made their way onto the curvature of his butt; only darkness surrounded them so she knew no one could see them.

But his twitching and shifting his weight was palpable even through his jacket.

She felt his hand stroke up her back towards the hooks of her bra.

“Wanna go somewhere private?” he asked into her ear.

“Yes, please,” she returned the favor. He still held onto her hand as he guided her out of there. She held onto the sides of her jacket to keep it closed as he led her to the spot behind the bleachers: someone had pinned a stretched and tanned cowhide to the metal rungs holding up the bleachers themselves. It was as if someone knew they were coming and gave them a bit of privacy. Jeff ran a hand through his feathery hair and gazed into Sierra's face; in the dim light, she could make out the nervous expression on his face.

“Okay, so how do you wanna do this?” he asked into her ear even though they faced away from the speakers.

She nibbled on her bottom lip and moved into his mouth. She kissed once. Twice. Four times.

“Wait, wait, wait—” he stopped her as he clasped his hands onto her shoulders.

He reached down for the rose on her waist; he released it from her waist and clipped it into the lapel of his jacket, right above the Ramones pin.

“Okay, go ahead,” he beckoned her.

She held onto his upper back as she pressed her lips onto his. It felt like a million years since her first kiss with him.

It was difficult for him to reach for the hooks on her bra given her dress and the jacket over her upper body, but by some stroke of luck, he managed to do it. They were about to paint the colors of the wind with each and every kiss.

She could feel the warmth of his body getting to be a bit too much: she helped him take off his jacket, which he hung up on the rung behind her. She unbuttoned his shirt to touch his chest. The skin there was soft and toned, and yet she had no idea what else to do, so she reached down to the button of his jeans to loosen him up.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa—hang on a second.”

He unfastened his jeans and, before she could go any further, someone behind them cleared their throat. They both froze in place to find Bebe standing right there at the end watching them; despite the dim light, Sierra could make out the stunned expression on her face.

“What—are you guys doing?” she asked them in a low enough voice for them to hear over the music behind them.

“Having a moment,” Jeff quipped at the drop of the hat. In the darkness, Sierra let her hand meander down his jeans to touch the skin under the belt for the first time.

“I won't tell anyone, I promise,” she vowed. Sierra turned her head to find her flashing them both a wink and a knowing smile as “I Will” by the Beatles came on over the speakers behind them.

Even to the current time, Sierra still thanked Bebe for that. It was hard to believe she actually saw her as the Wicked Witch at one point.


	12. paint with the wind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _"You think you own whatever land you land on,  
>  the Earth is just a dead thing you can claim.  
> But I know every rock and tree and creature  
> has a life, has a spirit, has a name."_  
> -"Colors of the Wind", Judy Kuhn

Sierra shuffled through the papers before her. These were all stray drawings that she had made on a whim after classes, albeit whenever she scrounged a moment during high school. She recalled classes feeling harder and more strenuous, especially since the pressure was on her as well as her class mates if they wanted to get into college.

There were these stray moments she overheard Jeff speaking to one of his track and field buddies about majoring in art at the school over in Missoula, and she wanted to go into it with him. Roz and Bebe both finally told her about it one day and their dual wish to go into art history, whereas Zero had no idea what she wanted to do there.

“I might just be a general major, there's not much speaking to me,” she confessed as she flipped through a school catalogue at lunchtime one day.

“Too bad they don't have a hockey major there,” Sierra joked with her.

“Right? I'd be more than happy to do that if they had that but—gosh, I don't really know…”

It was such a strange sight to see Zero walking around the school grounds with an almost absent expression on her face. She always had a twinkle in her dark eyes and a spring to her step, and at the thought of a hockey game coming up at the end of the week. But for the greater part of her junior and senior years, and even in the summer between the two, nothing could deny the hollow expression on her olive face. Her dark eyes often gazed out to the trees out around Sierra's house whenever she and Roz came over to visit.

Some time in her junior year, Zero wore her hockey jersey more and more, and yet found herself speaking less and less. It was like someone had flipped a switch on her.

It came to a point in which Roz suggested she join her, Bebe, and Sierra in a summer drawing class at the high school. Indeed, as Sierra picked up a painting from the stack, she recalled that Zero did in fact join the three of them. She said something about it being a change of pace, a bout of relaxation away from the quick movement of being a hockey player.

It was a torrid day in late June, a couple of weeks following the last day of sophomore year for Sierra, Roz, and Bebe, and the four girls padded to that old art classroom. They congregated to one side of the room together right underneath the air conditioner vent. Even though all four of them wore tank tops, shorts, and sandals, it was a relief from the sweltering humidity and hot sun over their heads.

“So we're gonna draw—a model?” Zero asked Sierra in a hushed voice.

“I think so. There's a stool there in front of us—” She gestured to the spindly wooden stool on the floor before them. “—I think more people are coming, though. It's not just gonna be us.”

She glanced over at Bebe and the lights shining down on her blonde curls. Her skin was so clean and clear, even in the wake of the rush of hormones running through the four of them. Another girl took her seat next to her, followed by another and another; soon the room filled up with girls.

A dull pain emerged in Sierra's lower belly, one that pulsated and gave her a sense of discomfort. She shifted her weight in her seat a bit; and the fact it was hot that day didn't help matters, either. She ran her fingers through her dark hair even though it remained off of her neck and shoulders. She hadn't had her period yet; but the look on her face caught Roz's attention.

“Are you alright?” she asked Sierra. Zero glanced over at her with a baffled look on her face.

“I'm hot—” She was cut off by the door opening and Jeff stepped into the room in his track shorts and a loose T-shirt with the new art teacher. All she could recall after that was Jeff removed his shirt and took a seat on the stool before the four of them. He only wore those little dark blue track shorts and yet his smooth hair sprawled over his shoulders and down onto his bare chest.

Sierra glanced over at Zero at one point and the flustered look upon her face. Her brown eyes scanned over Jeff's body, over his bare legs and his black Chuck Taylors, and then over his thighs and his bare toned body.

Sierra nibbled on her bottom lip as the pain in her belly pounded on even as she examined the contours of his body. All that football, and basketball, and track and field in junction with sitting alone in his room with nothing more than his bass guitar and his Ramones records have given him quite the lovely toned shape. All of the paints and all of the pencil scratches on the paper on the table before the four girls couldn't imitate the glow to his skin any quicker. His hair was smooth and silky, even from a distance. The muscles in his arms and his chest were smooth, with the appearance of fresh churned butter.

She took a glimpse over at Zero again and her raised eyebrows and her parted dark lips. Even just sitting there, Sierra could witness yet another side of her friend surfacing. She glimpsed over at Roz and the smirk on her face.

She returned to Jeff before her and the Mona Lisa type smile showing at her. Her eyes locked onto his and she showed him a shy smile in return. She peered up at him again as she ran the fanned paintbrush with burnt ochre and vermillion watercolor over the paper to give his skin the colors of a sunset.

She had inched close to him behind the bleachers and now she came close to him here in front of all of these girls, and she couldn't help but find it hot.


	13. drawn together

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _“I want to live with a cinnamon girl,  
>  I could be happy the rest of my life with her.”_  
> -“Cinnamon Girl”, Type O Negative (originally by Neil Young)

A few weeks after that day in the art class, and she hid the painting at the bottom of the stack, Sierra caught Jeff in the little supermarket there on the other side of Big Sandy. She was alone, and only there to pick up some things for her parents as her mother worked an extra shift and her father was visiting her grandparents. He walked with his younger sister next to him and a wicker basket slung over his arm. She walked down the aisle with the breads and pasta for some jasmine rice and a peek through the spice rack at him there in the neighboring aisle.

He had tied his hair in a high, taut ponytail to keep it off the back of his neck. His sister had cute little pig tails donned on either side of her head held by bright pink hair pretties and wore a little pink and white striped dress. Sierra smiled at him as she pushed a couple of bottles of cinnamon out of the way. He had on a clean light pearly white basketball jersey: she could smell his cologne even over the definitive scent of vanilla to her right.

His sister said something which brought a laugh from him. Sierra smiled as he lunged forward for something. He returned back up and turned towards the spice racks: she backed away to make it look like she minded her own business.

Sierra ran her fingers through her black hair and caught the feeling of heat around the crown of her head. She padded towards the rice, and picked out a sack of jasmine rice, and lay it in the wicker basket. She kept going towards the end, where she was met with the produce section. She turned her head to find Jeff and his sister walking towards the milk and eggs; even in hindsight, she wondered if there on the rack stood all of those cheesy little Harlequin books at the end of the aisle next to them.

But she couldn't tell as Jeff took a glimpse over the glass doors with the milk and coffee creamer, and then a glimpse over at her.

Sierra turned away and padded towards the produce.

Flustered, she picked out a bunch of bananas and some big red cherries the size of marbles. She picked out a bunch of lush bright red apples before she moved over to the avocados and the melons.

She set down the basket on the shelf before so she could hold the watermelons before her chest to compare the two. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the Kingfishers over by the vegetables: Roz and Zero helping out Nana Kingfisher together.

She was about to set down the right melon on the display when Jeff and his sister rounded the corner behind her. She hoped he didn't see her as she picked up a pair of avocados, and then made her way over to the Kingfishers to at the very least say “hi” to them. She knew he didn't see her. He didn't see her.

Like she wasn't even there.

She overheard Nana Kingfisher saying something when the intercom speakers on either side of the room crackled on over her head.

“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,” said the manager, “I'm here with Jeff—Jeff Ament? You said your name was? Yes. I'm here with Jeff and he wants to make an announcement.”

Sierra froze right there right behind the Kingfishers, all of whom turn around to see her there. Roz's face lit up at the sight of her.

“Sierra—”

“I just want y'all to know,” Jeff announced, his voice echoing over the high bright ceiling and through the shiny linoleum of the market, “that Sierra Roseburg is a total doll and a half. She's hell of an artist and I'm taking her to junior prom!”

Zero gaped at her and Nana Kingfisher showed her a sweet smile. She froze, perfectly still there on the linoleum as some people behind her applauded. Her face bloomed with a hot blush; Roz hurried over to her and threw her arms around her.

She knew she would have to tell Bebe when she found the chance. Everything she had known about Jeff up to that point meant nothing.

Here was the preacher's son, disobeying his parents and albeit with his sister right there next to him.

She could only hope that she didn't tell their parents.


	14. so like a rose

Junior prom was quite the event now that Sierra recalled it from the moment she, Roz, and Bebe tried on dresses together.

Nana Kingfisher was kind enough to help them out even with the burgeoning weakness in her arms. Much to her surprise, she did have quite the eye for color, which would explain why Roz and Zero always looked so well put together as they grew older alongside Sierra and Jeff. 

And if she recalled correctly, Sierra wore the same little soft silk rosy pink dress with the frilly roses around the waist to her senior prom. She never earned the title of queen either of the two times, as there was no way she could what with Bebe and that icy blue dress in junction with her smooth golden ringlets, but she felt like royalty with Jeff linking up arms with her. She felt like royalty especially during junior year.

She couldn't put her finger on it but she knew she had it made, even with her not really knowing if she and Jeff were in fact together or not. He was still the preacher's son and she was still the girl down the street who had a likening for the preacher's son.

Indeed, between his announcement to the whole entire grocery store that he wanted to take her as his prom date that year and the event of prom itself, she roamed about the school hallways with everyone watching her. It made her uncomfortable at first because she knew and everyone else knew. Jeff liked her. The cat slipped out of the bag.

But some time around Thanksgiving, she developed a little more of a spring in her step at the thought. Jeff liked her, and as far as she knew, his parents had no idea about it. As far as she knew, anyways.

He had put on a soft rich red suede jacket over matching trousers and a silk shirt; and he still wore his Chuck Taylors. Except this time around, he had removed the cross from around his neck. He never explained why to her, either, but she recalled that little sliver of metal missing from the spot in between his collar bones.

Had Jeff not been there, she swore the whole occasion would be boring: Roz and Zero were late to the party, which up to that point was so unlike the two of them. But Sierra danced with him much like how they danced together during the Sadie Hawkins dance.

He even gave her a little corsage before they stepped into the room together. Her little shoes clanked over the hard wooden floor as they made their way to the table on the far side of the room.

"May I?" he offered to pour her a glass of orange soda.

"Please," she insisted. As he handed her the little glass, she spotted the circle of little specks of blue paint on the back of his hand.

"What happened there?" she asked him.

"Where?"

"On your hand. Did you have a little mishap with paint before the show?"

He pulled his hand back for a closer look in the dim blue lights and then he smiled at her.

"I did, actually," he confessed with a raise of his dark eyebrows. "I was trying to think of something to paint beforehand. Also..." He gestured for her to move in closer to his face. She glanced around to make sure no one was eavesdropping on them: the Kingfishers still hadn't showed up to the party yet. Thus, she hovered right before his lips as though she was about to kiss him.

But she never did, and he never did it with her.

He bowed his head a bit. She knew he was nervous, and the little nibble on his lip told her everything she needed to know.

"Is everything okay?" she gently asked him. He moved his lips towards the side of her face as if he was in fact about to kiss her.

She braced herself for it.

"Come to school with me," he whispered into her ear.

"Where?" she asked him.

"Missoula. We can get out of this town. Let's be artists together. You, me, Bebe, and the Kingfishers."

"It's only junior year, though," she pointed out. He looked into her eyes again.

"We have to think about it, though," he insisted. "It's still junior year but it won't be for very much longer. We have to get out of this town. I have to get out of this town, and I know you do, too."

She gazed up at him, her mind blank but it was as if he had read her mind. He lowered his gaze down to her waist and the roses around the rim of the bodice.

"You are so like a rose," he breathed into her lips.

"So are you," she retorted with a light brushing onto his. She knew no one was looking and even if they were looking on in their direction, she had not a single care in the world. Sierra pulled back a bit for a peer into his eyes, so luminous even in the shadows there.

"Come to school with me," he repeated. "Let's be artists together."

"Gladly."

She never got to kiss him again that evening, or any other time between then and the last day of school, but she did manage to get alone with him after school on that last day. Nana Kingfisher had fallen ill with something rather sour, which meant Roz and Zero had to rush on home about an hour before the end of the day to check on her as well as their parents. This in turn meant Sierra had no ride home and she would have to walk all the way back to the tree line.

That is, until Jeff rolled up in his car with his windows each rolled down. He reached the edge of the curb on her left and she caught the sound of Free playing in his stereo.

"Sierra, do you wanna ride?" he offered her.

"Please!" she declared.

"Hop on in, I'll take you home."

Those final four words stayed with her even in the present moment. Something about them struck a chord with her and she could still hear them at an almost subconscious level. Something about it lingered with her the same way "so like a rose" remained with her.

"I'll take you home."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and yes, the title is in reference to "So Like a Rose" by Garbage <3


	15. the green field, part two

Sierra recalled the day word got out that Nana Kingfisher had passed.

It was the week after spring break and the week before senior prom; their father and Bebe both suggested that it as if she knew the kids were about leave soon and she had served her role of the grandmother. Zero had missed her chance to enter school the year before and thus she tried it again the fall before then.

As a result, that Monday morning, Sierra awoke the sound of a harsh knocking on the panel of the front door.

Her mother answered to find Roz standing there at the doorstep with tears streaming down her lovely face. Sierra skidded into the room and found out what had happened.

She went in her sleep.

She threw her arms around Roz, dear Rosalind, the girl she had known for seven years and grew up with alongside her sister. She asked about Zero and how she was taking it.

"She just shut down," she stammered as she wiped the tears from her brown eyes. "I don't know if we'll be able to come to school today..." She buried her face into Sierra's nightshirt; Sierra herself felt the tears burning her eyes. Granted, she had her grandparents but Nana Kingfisher was always so kind to her. She helped pick out prom dresses, after all. And she was right there when Jeff announced his taking Sierra as his date.

Indeed, she even hurried over to the Aments' house to check on him. She didn't care if it was Monday morning or not: she wanted to spend some time with him.

Everything seemed like such a blur even in hindsight.

She remembered Jeff throwing his arms around her and holding her close. It felt as if she had lost her own grandmother.

They all skipped school that day—even Bebe could not muster the desire to go to class that day. They were all seniors, anyway: Jeff and Sierra both had their projects due for their fourth year AP art class at the end of the week, but that was about it.

In fact the next drawing in the stack was dated from that week.

Following the news, Sierra had scrapped her original drawing and made something new for the exam in two weeks. She had made a portrait of Nana Kingfisher from an old photograph courtesy of Zero, with her jet black hair underneath a rouse of white and red feathers and a topaz medallion about her neck. She drew it over the course of the week whenever she could snatch a moment; she sat down in the cafeteria across from Jeff as he finished his drawing.

He watched her do it. He watched her grieve all over the big smooth eggshell-colored A1 sized paper with her graphite pencils. Every day at lunch and during their break, he would rest his face in the base of his hand and watch her with such intent.

That Thursday afternoon, after swinging around to pick up Sierra after school, Zero told both her and Jeff, who headed out to his car, that the memorial was going to take place that Saturday. Sierra climbed into the passenger seat next to her with a heavy dead weight of a feeling upon her shoulders.

"She was cremated already," Zero explained as she put on her sunglasses. "But—we're going to give her ashes a proper ceremony."

"You're not gonna take some ashes with you to Missoula?" asked Sierra.

"If her ashes are separated, she can't rest," Zero pointed out in a soft voice, and without another word, she started up the car.

She remembered the next day that she walked to her art class with her portrait tucked away in a roll under her arm. She handed in the portrait of Nana Kingfisher when she felt a tap on her shoulder.

She turned around to find Jeff gesturing for her to follow him somewhere.

Sierra followed Jeff out to the cafeteria, but he kept walking on towards the gym and the hockey rink. He led her around the corner of the hockey rink to the stretch of green, so green under the radiant morning sun. She eyed the tractor, still there in the middle of the grass from when she and Jeff had their encounter before Zero's championship game.

He took a glimpse over his shoulder to see if she was still behind him. He gestured for her to come closer.

She turned her head to ensure they were alone.

She returned in the direction of the tractor and Jeff, who had ducked behind the big wheel again. She rounded the edge of the shovel to find him setting down his book bag on the grass.

"What're you doing?" she asked him.

"Well..." he began as he fixed his smooth shoulder length hair, "since the memorial is tomorrow, it's going to be some time before we can find a moment alone again."

"But prom, though," she pointed out.

"Gonna say this right now, it's not gonna be as fun with all of this happening." He gestured for her to come closer to him. Reluctantly, she ambled over to him and set down her courier bag.

"Long time coming," she told him in a low voice even though they were alone.

"Long time coming indeed," he echoed with a lopsided grin on his face. She hesitated for a few seconds, but then she ran her finger down his chest. He pushed a lock of her black hair back from the side of her neck.

"Really hope Bebe keeps her promise from Sadie Hawkins," he told her as he pressed his lips onto hers. It felt strange of him to say that to her, but she thought of Nana Kingfisher right then. She could not rest if her remains were separated, and yet Sierra could feel her presence with them with every brush of the lips. They were alone there on the green field, behind the tractor.

And then she could see his intent right there. They were all friends having grown up together: all secrets known as exemplified by that day in the supermarket. A death in the house opposite from her and Jeff, in just this country town and everyone knew it, but the hushed tone of his voice and the fact no one was around told her a different story here.

This was precious, made further by the fact they were alone. All she could do was let him feel her up behind closed doors, behind the big tractor, before they departed for Missoula together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Little reference to Emily Dickinson's poem "There's been a Death, in the Opposite House" at the end there


	16. the arrowhead

It would be another few days before Sierra and Jeff could find their next moment alone together.

He was always that neighbor boy, so far away and yet so friendly to her. They grew up together: they had watched each other walk to the bus stop and watched each other go off to each other's classes. She knew that, even though they never exactly hung out together per se, she saw him as a friend. Her best friend, especially since he was more than there for not just her, but for the Kingfishers. Even though they were worlds apart, she saw him as more than the boy next door after their morning in the green field behind the tractor.

For about a day or so, Sierra could still smell him on her clothes and taste him on her lips. She tried to not let her mother figure out what was going on when she licked her lips more so than normal, or why she seemed so quick to launder her jeans from that day: but she kept the blouse she wore that day in her closet so she could relish in the aroma of his cologne. She was lucky to not find a grass stain one on the fabric on the back of the blouse.

Indeed, the day before the memorial, when they walked to the school from the back parking lot and no one was looking, he reached back towards her and slowed his pace. He extended his hand towards her and she knew what he was doing. She gripped onto his hand: his skin was warm with the sweetness of the May morning.

He seemed to wear a golden crown upon his head with the sun washing down upon them: locks of his soft hair even resembled the parts of a crown.

A warm lovely morning following such a tragic event and a fierce winter at that.

“I'll catch you after school,” he whispered to her once they reached the gate of the campus, “I wanna show you something, so wait for me here.”

“Okay.” They brushed each other's fingers before he padded away to his first period class. She watched him go all the way down the sidewalk, that is until she heard someone say her name.

“Sierra!”

She turned to find Roz hurrying towards her with dark sunglasses on her face and a little black box in hand; she spotted Zero's car turning away from there and heading over to the school's driveway.

“Oh, hi!” she greeted her. “What you got there?”

“This is for you—Zero picked it out and our mom helped put it together. It's for being our friend for so long.”

Sierra took the box and opened it up to reveal a black glassy arrowhead about the size of the pad of her thumb, dotted with white spots, suspended on a black necklace: the pendant itself was lined with little beads of turquoise against some silver.

“Oh, Roz—this is beautiful,” she gasped. “Thank you.”

“It's snowflake obsidian, or volcanic glass. We are moving down near Yellowstone in a few months after all. It's said to act as a form of protection. Here—”

She gave her black hair a toss behind her head and took the pendant out of the box. Sierra stepped away from the gate so they were out of the way; and with a lift of her hair off of her neck, Roz helped put the pendant on around her neck. The arrowhead itself lay against the milky skin of Sierra's chest; she turned for Roz to look over, and she showed her a smile.

“Absolutely gorgeous,” she remarked, and she put her arms around Sierra as she thanked her again.

The two of them then strode to their first period class together. In fact, she did feel protected, not by the fact it was an arrowhead dangling off of her neck but by the fact she walked with the power of volcanoes at her side. In fact, the hummingbird drawing which she had been sketching on for a few days in her AP art class, and needed a bit of color, ended with all manner of red, orange, and yellow, like that of hot lava.

Indeed, once Jeff saw it at the end of the day, he was stunned by the sight of it and the way it glimmered in the afternoon sunlight.

“Roz gave me this,” Sierra explained as they congregated there at the gate. “So—what'd you wanna show me?”

“Have you ever ridden on a skateboard?”

She shook her head, and he gestured for her to follow him to his car.

They drove out of the school parking lot to the far side of Big Sandy, where there stood a small, ramshackle, but active skate park. Her heart skipped several beats as this was such an unknown to her, perhaps more so than their first encounter behind the church.

But he was kind to her. Once they were inside of the park, and a bit of a way from the ramps, he let her stand with one foot on the matte black pad of his skateboard, which he had had in the truck. She held out her arms to steady herself; he held onto the middle of her back as she gingerly set both feet on the board.

“Careful—you got it?” he asked her.

“I think so?” She stood still right there with her arms held out before her. He nudged her a bit to have her roll along the concrete, but she lost her balance and fell right back onto him. The skateboard shot forward as she landed onto him.

“Ow! You okay?” she quipped as she clasped her hands onto the pavement, on either side of his shoulders.

“Yeah—but be careful, though,” he grunted out as he eyed the arrowhead dangling around her neck, “that thing almost poked me in the eye.”

She hung over his face for a moment.

“Don't wanna lose those eyes,” she said to him in a low voice.

“I wouldn't wanna lose yours, either,” he added; she climbed off of him to fetch the skateboard and try again.

She never did learn how to ride a skateboard in proper fashion like him, but she kept that arrowhead in a safe place since then, right there in its box on her nightstand.


	17. the stage and the party favor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _"Look - now I know, we could've done it better,  
>  but we can't change the weather.  
> When the weather's come and gone:  
> books don't make sense if you read 'em backwards."_  
> -"party favor", Billie Eilish

Graduation was all a flash, a whirl, and a blur to Sierra. There weren't many graduating on that Saturday, about sixty kids, but they all felt like a family to one another, all dressed in their blue and gold caps and gowns: she and Jeff had their tight braided tassels strewn around their necks to signify their being among the most high performing art students. Since his last name started the beginning of the alphabet, and she hung around near the end, they sat a couple of rows apart from one another. She had the arrowhead Roz had given her resting upon the collar of her gown so the white splotches in the obsidian shone bright under the gym lights.

Bebe had curled her golden ringlets the tightest they could be and wore that old bat from the Halloween party, from what she says as a token of memories from life there in Big Sandy. The Kingfishers awaited them after the fact over on the bleachers: Zero wore her hockey jersey over a mini skirt given it was quite warm that day. Roz herself meanwhile donned a white dress with those silver and turquoise anklets and her accompanying necklace under her gown.

Sierra watched Jeff cross the stage before her for his diploma and the hand shake from their principal, vice principal, and a few of their old teachers. They grew up with these people: it was almost on par with saying good bye to their parents.

When her name was called exactly two names down from “Rosalind Kingfisher”—and the mention she was Violet's younger sister—and “Beatrix Marshall”, she strode up the aisle towards the stage for her diploma and her round of hand shakes. It all felt like a dream to bide farewell to everyone in Big Sandy, but a new chapter awaited her, as well as Jeff, Bebe, and the Kingfishers. They were going to be the force to be reckoned with down in Missoula. The five of them. All friends. All together.

Her mother and Mrs. Kingfisher were both emotional for such a big night, and so soon following Nana Kingfisher's memorial.

As they all gathered together for one last round of applause and the appropriate chucking of the caps into the rafters, Sierra and Roz hurried over to the bleachers with their hands clasped onto the mortar boards of their caps. They were about to reach their families when the former felt a tap on her shoulder.

She turned to find Jeff lingering behind her. Roz skidded to a stop.

“What's up?” Sierra asked him.

“Just wanted to ask what you ladies are doing,” he confessed with a shy smile and a bow of his head. “My parents are taking me out to dinner over at Denny's.”

“We're gonna have a party,” Roz explained. “All of us—the Roseburgs and the Kingfishers.”

“We're gonna be at Denny's, too,” Sierra added.

“Sweet! I'll see you ladies there, and—Sierra?” She paused right there and he leaned his head in closer to her face. “I wanna ask you something when we get there.”

“Okay. Shall we meet up in the back hallway?”

“Yeah. Like after the hockey game.” He showed her a lopsided little grin and then stepped away. She watched him off for a moment before she returned to the two families awaiting her. She took off her gown and slung it over her shoulder but she kept the mortar board rested upon her head as she walked to the car with her parents. Indeed, when they all arrived at Denny's, Sierra spotted Jeff walking up to those front doors. After they had seated themselves at the elongated table in the middle of the room, she excused herself and headed down the hallway to make it look as though she was about to head into the ladies' room.

Once she was out of sight enough, she turned around and spotted Jeff heading towards her: he had taken off his cap and gown and now faced her straight on wearing a nice dress shirt coupled with clean looking slacks and those Chuck Taylors once again.

“What'd you want to ask me?” she began in a soft voice.

“Well—seeing as we're going to school together, um—I wanted to ask you if—you wanted to move in with me?”

“Move in with you?” She knitted her eyebrows together at that.

“My dad and I got a little apartment in Missoula for myself. But it's of good size, though. We can live together if you'd like.”

“I was just thinking of staying in the dorms, to be honest,” she confessed.

“You wouldn't wanna be in those dank things,” he assured her. “We visited there last September just to get an idea of it. Hot in the summer time and always smells funny, too. My place is about a block from school so we can both walk together.”

“Just like the first day,” she recalled with a bit of a wistful tone to her voice.

“Just like that first day,” he echoed: that lopsided grin returned to his face again.

“I'll do it. But what should I tell my parents, though? You know—you still being the preacher's son and everything.”

“Tell them—” He paused. It was a definite loophole she knew he hadn't thought about much: but every loophole has a way of closing in some fashion. And then his face lit up.

“Tell them—you're just moving in with the Kingfishers. I guess Zero found a place for herself and Roz, too, right near there. So is Bebe.”

“Oh, wow, really?”

“Yeah. That's what I've been told anyways. But all else fails, use that for a story. I know you want to be closer to me, and I do, too. The first step is to actually—you know—” He inched closer to her. “—get close.”

He peered behind him to make sure no one was eavesdropping or watching them; and then he returned to her for a brush of the lips. The first and only boy she ever kissed.

“We did it,” she whispered to him. “We graduated and now we're gonna be the kids that got out.”

“We sure did,” he added with a wink.


	18. downtown missoula

It was that apartment there, that apartment near the school where Sierra truly had her awakening with Jeff. It became real from that point onward. Like an epiphany. A wave of realization from the moment she set down her things in her bedroom.

All the years of living down the street from him, the resistance of heading on down to his place to even so much as hang out with him. But now, at that point, it was very real. She watched him prop up his skateboard against the wall of the dining room. It was real. It just got real.

They had just moved onto the property together by the middle of the summer, to which the heat of the day followed them wherever they went in this rather good sized city in Montana. Add to this, she wasn't acquainted with the humidity from the western side of the Rockies. Even though she was living with Jeff, and Bebe and the Kingfishers were on the other side of the building as their neighbors, there was a part of her that missed Big Sandy. They grew up together there, even if they were so far apart from one another. It felt so alien and yet so real, and so quick.

Maybe she needed a little more time. Maybe she needed something else.

But from the moment he asked her to move in with him to the day he gave her her own set of keys was all the time she had.

And then she was reminded of his comfort, especially when she caught him on the edge of his bed with his beat up little bass guitar cradled in his lap. She flashed back when she overheard him playing from the back window there in the yard as she peeked her head into the room. He lifted his head and pushed some of his smooth hair back to show off more of his skin. His eyes sparkled at the sight of her: he dropped his gaze to the arrowhead pendant around her neck.

“Hey, Sierra, what's up?” he greeted her as he clamped his fingers down on the fret board to silence the bit of distortion left over.

“Just wanted to see what you were doing,” she replied as she tucked a lock of black hair behind her ear.

“Oh, just wazzing around on my bass here. By the way, I didn't tell you this but if and when you get the chance, I want you to keep your eyes and ears open with me.”

“What for?”

“Well—you know. We were living in such a small town and it was hard to find anyone to jam with. So, now that we're in a bigger area, in a college town, that means we can bloom here.”

“Wait,” she began with a turn of her head and a knitting of her eyebrows, “were there times—you wanted to hang out in school?”

“With you?”

“Yeah.”

“Absolutely. All the time. You and I are both artists. And yet, it almost felt like I couldn't talk to you because I lived in such a pretty poor and pretty Catholic household.”

Sierra shook her head and turned away from him a little bit.

“What's wrong?”

“I don't know, I feel like we should've had some more time to get to know each other better,” she confessed, to which he frowned in response.

“More time? Sierra, we grew up together. We made art together.”

“Yeah, but we were separate worlds apart, though. I feel like I know you, but at the same time, I don't.”

Jeff nibbled on his bottom lip and set his bass down on the floor, and leaned the neck against the wall. He opened his arms for her.

“Come here, Mamacita,” he whispered to her.

“Mamacita?” she echoed with a giggle.

“Yeah. Hey, you wanna know sump'n?”

“What's that?”

“We got together behind that tractor. Outside. Tell me you still don't know me after that.” The butterflies whirled up in the pit of her stomach. He was right about that after all. But there was one thing that nagged at her, one that she could never put her finger on. It came to her in a flash of a memory; after hearing him playing in the backyard there of his house.

“Can I tell you something?” she asked him in a soft voice.

“Sure. You can tell me anything.” She nibbled on her bottom lip at the sight of the placid look on his handsome face. This boy she had known for years was showing yet another part of himself towards her, like the shades of a painting, a portrait of a boy, a man rather.

“There was a time I thought you didn't like me,” she confessed, “—like, you like Bebe more than me.”

“When did you think that?”

“That Halloween party,” she recalled with a bit of reluctance.

“The one with the bats and shit?”

“Yes.”

“Sierra, that was a long time ago,” he pointed out. “And that was back when we were pubescent kids, too. You know how shit gets fucking crazy at that time. You wanna know sump'n else?”

“Yeah.”

“Since you and I were so separate from each other, I didn't think you'd like me. In fact, when I asked you to move in with me here, I didn't think you'd say yes.”

She gazed into his face, into those bright eyes. It all made sense at that point.

She pressed her hands on either side of his face and brought her lips to his. That fresh brand new smell of the room around them felt so different in comparison to the fresh grass from the green field behind the hockey rink, and yet it brought her a sense of comfort. They were alone for once. The Kingfishers and Bebe were next door but they had their privacy at that point.

When she moved back for a look into his eyes, he gazed back at her with a disoriented expression upon his face.

“What was that for?” he asked, stunned.

“Because you're the only boy I have ever liked.”

He nibbled on his bottom lip and dropped his gaze to her chin. The silence was brief but enough to envelope them in something.

“I have an idea,” he stated in a near whisper. “About seventy miles north of here is Flathead Lake. And seeing as it's kind of hot here at the moment—I wanna take you there.”

“Go swimming?” She raised her eyebrows at the notion.

“Well, I was thinking of a little camping trip there, but we can go swimming there if you'd like. I mean, it is the middle of summer here after all. I'll take my bass and my skateboard with me, because I was told that there's also a skate park up there, too. And about two hundred miles from here is Spokane and there's a good sized park there. I don't really wanna go to Spokane, though…”

“But—it'd just be you and me, though… right?”

“Yes,” he replied. “Absolutely. Just you and me in Polson, the little town there by the lake. We can buy ourselves some time for all of this—” He gestured to the room around him. “—all of this here. And we can do it before school starts.” He gazed into her dark eyes once more.

“Kiss me,” he whispered, and she brought her lips back to his again.


	19. the city by the lake

“You got your drawing pad?” Jeff asked her as they finished loading up his car.

“Right here.” She showed him the thick pad of heavy drawing paper tucked under her arm.

“Alright! Let's bounce.”

Sierra set the pad underneath the passenger seat and adjusted the skirt of her pink and yellow sundress. She then turned to Zero there at the sidewalk to watch them off and put her arms around her.

“You guys stay safe, alright?” Zero advised her.

“Of course! I'll call you and Roz when we get there.”

She gave Jeff an embrace before he slid into the driver's side seat of the car; Sierra put her sunglasses on once she was inside there.

Zero waved them off as they embarked on the seventy mile drive up to Flathead Lake. Given it was a warm, humid day in the middle of July without a cloud in the sky, they both had the windows rolled down. He played Free, Judas Priest, and the Ramones for her the whole drive through the lush green Rocky Mountain forest. At some point, as they reached a vast clearing that made her think of the Pacific Northwest, that little pocket of the world that always seemed to be shrouded in darkness and misted rain, Jeff mentioned something about ice cream and it being the quintessential ice cream day.

“Think about it—it's hot and moist outside. Doesn't get anymore appropriate for ice cream.”

“Yeah, let's get some on this next stop here,” she agreed with a grin on her face. There was not a single cloud in the blue sky overhead as they stopped at a little service station at the halfway bend in the road. He bought her an ice cream cone and she got him a root beer float.

Within time, they reached the small town of Polson and the vast clear and crisp Flathead Lake, nestled there in the hills underneath the cold high looming Rocky Mountains. Down by the water stood a campground, to which she and Jeff took to with their little bright green tent. Within a few feet from the water stood two trees, to where they pitched their tent and Jeff set up his amp to give his bass that distinct sense of distortion. He took a seat on a minute milk crate he had in the back of his car which he used to hold a car jack and spare lug nuts.

Sierra sat across from him on the little lawn chair with her drawing pad rested upon her lap. She doodled around a bit at first as she tried her hand at texture by way of the little pine cone on the ground to her right, but once Jeff caught a riff and began playing a slow, almost psychedelic bass line, she caught glimpse of his hair in the sunlight. The way it radiated in the golden summer sun made her think of a crown. She picked out her hard pencil first for the sketch and moved at quick pace to capture that light before the sun moved.

She was fast to pick up her yellow colored pencils from her little kit for that makeshift crown atop his head. She followed it up with beautiful oranges and browns, and then his face. She improvised his fingers on his fret board, and then even more so on the actual guitar and his legs. The background she made bright royal blue and purple to give contrast: she then showed it to him.

“Oh, man, Sierra, that's gorgeous!” he declared as he set his fingers across the fret board.

“You can have this if you'd like,” she offered him. He clasped a hand to his chest and set the bass down next to him; he then stood to his feet to take it from her.

“Thank you—my sweet friend—” He stepped on that pine cone and lost his balance. He landed on top of her: lucky for her, she held out the drawing pad to the side so each of the papers would remain intact. He gazed up at her from her thighs: even though she wore little yellow bike shorts underneath her skirt, he still had his face right above her pelvic area.

“Jeffrey,” she remarked.

“I was not intending for this to happen,” he confessed with a blush crossing his face. He scanned the smooth skin of her thighs for a moment before he climbed off of her and she punctured the perforations up top so as to give it to him.

“How 'bout you set down that bass guitar,” she offered, “and we have a nice early dinner together?”

“Nice early dinner and we can have a little bungle in the jungle here in our tent?” he teased her.

“That'd be rough, though,” she pointed out.

“Not necessarily,” he insisted, and then he hesitated for a moment. “Did you bring your paints with you?”

“I'm not painting on you,” she scoffed. “However, we can always look around for henna type stuff, though.”

“Now, that I'm up for! Dinner and some henna.”

Indeed, he locked his bass and his amp up in the back of the car and they rode into town for a little dinner there at the cafe overlooking the water. At one point, Sierra glanced over at him with a smile on her face as she sipped her pink lemonade.

This weekend was a good idea after all.


	20. subterranean henna dreams

Meanwhile, as part of her flashback to that trip phased out, Sierra propped her chin up in her hands and gazed up at the bookshelf on the other side of the room. Something else happened that day: they had dinner and got those henna tattoos, but then her memory escaped her.

It felt like such a dream right then and there, being in the hot humid Montana sun with him down by the shores of Flathead Lake. A psychedelic fever dream full of every shade of color of the rainbow. A painting that imitated every aspect of that trip, all the way down to the surface of the water and the last little green shrub sprouting out of the ground.

She did recall one thing that happened well after the fact, however.

They were about a week away from starting school, their first day of a new school. The both of them together with the Kingfishers and with Bebe, so they were all the new kids. Jeff waltzed into the room with that paisley henna tattoo still intact on the back of his hand and all down around his wrist, and his skateboard tucked underneath his arm. She raised her gaze from her drawing pad to greet him.

“Wanna try the skateboard again?” he offered her with a lopsided grin on his face.

She recalled that it was in fact quite the lovely day that afternoon and he in fact took her outside for another round of the skateboard. He held her by the hips once she climbed aboard it: she held out her arms to steady her balance.

She recalled she actually did right at that point, with her arms outstretched on either side of her. She also recalled that, at some point during that summer, Roz and Zero found marijuana—the latter assured Sierra it was to help them both relax with living in a strange place and the anxiety of starting school. Thus while she was riding the board down the sidewalk around their apartment, she caught a whiff of the burning paper from Zero's fingers as she lounged there on the front step.

Feeling the breeze in her dark hair and around her slender ankles underneath the skirt of her sundress, and catching the fierce distinct smell of the burning plant, she felt liberated. 

Away from the confines of a small town and being so far away and yet so close to her best friend.

A state of euphoria and a magic wild dream that she did not want to end, even by the time school started.


	21. one day in an art class

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> back in November 2012, I took a trip to this little town in Oregon called Newport, about a hundred miles from Portland, right on the coastline. It's one of many towns up there that is an absolute mecca for the arts in general, notably art glass (but it's got everything from straight up painters to toy makers). I'm gonna be waxing from my memories here in these next couple of chapters 💜

The first day of school began on a high note as Sierra and Jeff awoke that morning wanting to feel each other. No one else there with them. No one to tell them what to do, and yet even with how much he held her in his arms, there was a part of her that didn't want to be touched. His fingers ran over her hips and he lingered close to her face. She gazed into his face: his eyes were bright even under the blankets.

“Good morning,” he said to her in a soft voice.

“Good morning,” she sputtered as her voice broke a bit from sleep. “First day of school.”

“First day of school,” he echoed: his fingers caressed the slim hourglass of her body. She nibbled on her bottom lip: each touch was softer than the last. Their parents were back home, away from any question whatsoever. She thought of what he had said to her years ago: she could only be with him unless they were willing to get married. She had no idea if he had remembered that or if he was going in a different direction.

They were on their own, after all.

A thought crossed her mind. One that made her think of the place under the belt.

They did it a couple of times before but she thought of it some more. It was fleeting, but she thought of it. He kissed her on the lips before he climbed out of bed.

She showered before they headed to their very first class for the morning, ceramics. She let the warm water cascade over her black hair and the curvature of her shoulders: she liked the way the ends of her hair curled down her upper arms and her collar bones. Like the way the tentacles of an octopus curled underwater.

There was a part of her that felt like a mermaid, especially when she looked down at her nude body. She thought about the drawings she wanted to make over the course of those ten weeks. Try her hand at things like fins and underwater life itself.

Within time, she and Jeff walked down to the school as the chilled moist wind trickled through her wet hair. She shivered when they turned the corner; he adjusted the bill of his ball cap to protect his eyes from the bright morning sun.

It was the kind of campus that stood out in the elements, and all of the buildings looked as though they were made of seashells. Seashells even in the middle of Montana. The fine oceanic rain and the ocean itself, there in the middle of the Montana.

The whole room was stark and bright lit: on one wall stood a series of fused glass work, all of which looked as though they had been crafted to resemble the shape of lotus and orchid flowers. She peered up at the ceiling, at a series of medallions of all the colors of the rainbow dangling down: the lights of the classroom made them shine and cast all the colors of the rainbow onto the otherwise pure white tables about the room. Moreover, the blue and green tones had an almost neon flavor to them.

That was merely one class, now that Sierra correctly recalled.

She wondered if Roz and Zero were going to be in that class as well: she wanted them to witness the neon rainbows themselves before the day was done.

Jeff took his seat next to her and set his hand on the top of the table. She thought of making some kitchenware in that class when their teacher Miss Leaf talked about what they were going to do over the next ten weeks.

Their next class was an introduction to graphic design, a class which made Jeff's face light up upon striding through the doorway. For her, it was like seeing him as a little boy again. That young kid at the bus stop again; that same young boy who gave her his blue paint that day in art class.

Even there on the first day of class, where the twenty students began work on their very first project, he was so eager to begin sketching and drawing. At one point, she lifted her gaze from the leaf of paper and examined the twinkle in his eye: she could see it even from the side.

She took it as an elective for herself but she knew where he was going with it, especially when he showed her the drawing: a little white apple with a thick black outline and something that looked like card suits about the side facing them.

“Let me ask you, Sierra,” he began with his eyes glimmering, “does this not look like an album cover to you?”

“Yeah, it does,” she replied; his enthusiasm was infectious. She started smiling herself. Even when he made something as simple as a little stick figure with a ball cap on its head in the corner of the page, it made her smile some more.

Even just being there for one day in an art class. She never wanted the feeling to end even as they went to lunch together and then to their separate classes: she missed him when she attended her world history class. Too many dumb electives: not enough seeing Jeff's face light up with those big art classes.

The best part was their walking home together with Bebe, who sat next to Sierra in her last class of general biology, much to Jeff's amusement.

“So apparently there are these breeds of monkeys who have sex each other constantly,” he began to the both of them: the noise of the streets drowned him out a bit but they could hear him.

“Constantly—like that's all they do?” Sierra laughed at that.

“Constantly, like they swing about the trees and get together no matter what happens. It's like they have orgies with each other like every five minutes.”

“What are you saying?” Bebe quipped.

“Methinks the smell of the Kingfishers' pot is gettin' to him a bit, Beebs,” Sierra cracked, to which they all laughed out loud; a big truck lumbered past them so it was as if their laughter entwined with the noise of the street.

“Nah, it ain't that,” he confessed once the patch of sidewalk fell back into brief silence. “But them monkeys like to screw each other no matter what happens.”

“Do they also draw and make stuff?” Sierra teased him as they reached their apartment complex.

“If they want,” he answered with a chuckle. “But remember, they're monkeys so they probably don't get it like we do, though.”

Bebe chuckled some more as the front door of the Kingfishers' place entered their view. Sierra knew they weren't home, but she wondered if they still had some more of that magic marijuana with them. They were all on their own, after all.


	22. tangerine dreams

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _"If you want  
>  we could be, yeah, runaways.  
> Running from any sight of love..  
> Yeah, yeah, there ain't nothing;  
> there ain't nothing here for me.  
> There ain't nothing here for me anymore  
> but I don't wanna be alone."_  
> -"Desperado", Rihanna

It was some time around the middle of November when Jeff moseyed up to Sierra with a somber look upon his face; he had left his last class early to talk to his counselor, at least that was what he said to her earlier that day. Since he had a basketball tucked under his arm, he used his other hand to bring the lapels of his coat up to the bottom of his face to protect his skin from the chilly wind washing over them. He gazed up ahead at the sidewalk stretched before them.

“Hey—what's up?” she asked him when came within earshot.

“Let's wait 'til we reach the apartment first,” he told her in a grave tone of voice. She nodded her head in response. She wondered what he was going to tell her once they stepped out of the wind. They had been living together for four months after all; she wondered if he was going to officially ask her to be his girlfriend, even though they were all but boyfriend and girlfriend at that point. Her mind lunged ahead into engagement and potentially putting down roots there in Missoula.

They passed the Kingfishers' apartment and the sight of Zero stepping out wrapped in her jacket and with her hockey gear on her back. She grinned at Sierra and smoothed down her black hair.

“Would you guys like to come to dinner this Saturday night with Roz and me?” she offered them. “I've got the game and then we're gonna go to dinner. The two of you can come if you'd like.”

“I'd love to, Zero,” Sierra replied.

“Yeah, me, too,” Jeff added.

“Alright! I'll tell her when she gets off from school later on…” She strode past them and scurried down the sidewalk, perhaps to head to practice. Jeff led Sierra into their apartment, to which she shut the door behind her. She set down her things on the small comfy cozy couch and peeled off her jacket.

“So what'd you wanna tell me?” she asked him; big fat rain droplets pounded the roof over their heads, and she hoped if Zero's hockey team practiced indoors.

“My counselor told me they're ending graphic design next year.”

Sierra gaped at him in shock.

“What! Why?”

“No idea,” he confessed with a shake of his head. He set down the ball on the kitchen table so he could take off his coat as well. “Lack of money, I think? I mean, you remember that uproar with fuel a few years back. It's having a ripple effect. They're discontinuing it by the time this year is done.”

“So—what does that mean? You can always switch majors.”

“Yeah, but that sucks, though. Zero says a general major is no fun unless you're devoting most of your time with a sport.”

“You've got basketball, though.”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“But what?” She frowned.

“It's something I love doing. I mean, you've seen me in class.”

“Of course, of course.”

“I can't really think of anything else to do, if I'm honest. You know, at least you and Roz have studio art. And I don't really wanna do a music major, either.”

He closed his eyes and sighed through his nose.

“I haven't really found any bands around here, either,” she confessed with a shrug of her shoulders.

“Me, neither,” he added in a soft voice. He folded his arms over his chest.

“I think I'm gonna have to leave Missoula,” he admitted.

“But I thought we were going to be living together,” she insisted. “We were going to be a family of our own as well as roommates.”

“But what am I gonna do, though?” he argued. “The school is ending my major and there's really nothing else that's fitting well for me. Aside from you and the girls, there ain't nothing here for me anymore. I don't wanna live off of you, either, because you've got your own stuff to deal with. I don't wanna do that to you.”

She felt a lump forming in her throat. Her knees buckled such that she caught herself on the back of the couch.

“Whoa—” He stepped forward closer to her to catch her, but then she lunged forth and threw her arms around him. She buried her face in his chest.

“Sierra! Sierra—it's okay,” he assured her as he put his hands on her upper back.

“It's not okay,” she wept into his sweat shirt. “It's not—fucking okay—”

“I don't have anywhere else to go, though,” he gently said to her; she could hear a break in his voice. “—can't go back to Big Sandy—can't stay here—I have to leave.”

She lifted her head to look at him in the face and the tears brimming his eyes.

“I can come with you,” she whispered to him.

“What?”

“Take me with you,” she begged. “I want to go with you.”

He nibbled on his bottom lip.

“Tell you what,” he began as a tear streaked down his face, “when you're finished, I'll give you a ring and tell you what's up.”

She sniffled.

“You'll call me?” she echoed as the tears followed suit with her.

“Yeah,” he assured her. “It's three more years beginning in June. I'm sure it'll take me that long to get my shit together—wherever I might go. Just don't change our number here.”

She closed her eyes and he moved his head forward for a brush of the lips. The rain poured down over their heads: it was almost as if she could taste the rain as well as his tears.

“I'm gonna embrace every day after this,” he whispered.

“We should do one last work together, too,” she added.

“Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming up after all. Let's do it. Something bright and colorful. Let's call it 'Tangerine Dreams.'”

“Bright and colorful like every day we interacted with each other,” she added as she gave him another kiss.


	23. a travelling painting

The painting they planned on working on together over Thanksgiving and Christmas had spread over the course of the rest of the school year. Jeff had found a rather long leaf of off white paper with heavy grains after scrounging around for something in the back room behind the graphic design classroom; whenever he caught Sierra idle after a class or in the morning whilst getting ready, he whipped out a pencil from his jeans pocket for a scribble of her hair or the side of her face. The paper stayed plastered up against the wall of the kitchen as if it were stretched on a wooden board, thus they always had access to it.

She always did the same for him; it was because of that autumn and that winter, the both of them carried a pencil with them in their jeans pockets because neither of them knew when they would see each other from a good angle.

It took him a week or so but he managed to sketch down her head and her dark hair cascading over her shoulder like a shadowy waterfall.

And it took her two weeks but she managed to sketch down his head, that lush feathery crown of light hair all about his head and the shape of his button nose and his full moon-like face.

Some time in the week between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Zero and Roz swung by after school to relish their days with the two of them. The latter's logic was that it might be the last time they would see him.

For Thanksgiving, and the four of them gathered in the apartment for a big hearty potluck dinner, Roz gave Jeff a turquoise friendship bracelet for the same reason she gave Sierra the arrowhead pendant. Much like with her and the pendant, he vowed to always wear it no matter what the context. She and Zero brought a grasshopper pie for dessert but Sierra assured them they had apple pie to tithe them over.

“Well we can't really let this pie go to waste,” Zero pointed out as she cradled the tin in her hands. She glanced down at the pearly white whipped cream around the rim of the cookie crumb crust and the soft smooth green peppermint filling making up the interior of the pie. She then looked at her sister with a look of determination on her face.

“I hope you're hungry, baby sis,” she declared.

“Well, we don't really have a lot of room in our fridge at the moment, either,” Roz added.

“You guys are gonna eat that all by yourselves?” Sierra chuckled at that.

“Yeah, you guys have the apple one, we'll have this one,” Zero insisted as she set it down on the counter. “I might be skinny but I can eat a lot.”

Indeed, after a rather hearty dinner, Zero busted open the pie tin and handed her sister a fork. Jeff and Sierra watched them eat most of it; at one point, Zero unbuttoned her jeans, and that was when Jeff turned to Sierra with his eyes bright.

“You wanna share this apple pie with me?” he offered. She glanced down at the crumbly sugary crust on top of the apple slices and the cinnamon, and licked her lips.

“Got enough room in there?” she asked him.

“As a matter of fact, I do!” he replied as he reached for the can of whipped cream. Much to her surprise, neither of them felt sick afterwards, but neither of them could finish it. Meanwhile, the Kingfishers managed to eat the whole grasshopper pie between the two of them. The latter ran her fingers through her black hair and let out a low whistle.

“Man, that was rich,” she remarked.

“I won't be eating until well into the next day, that's for sure,” Roz followed up as she lay down on her back on the sofa.

At one point, in that odd week between Thanksgiving and Christmas break, Bebe managed to find the time to visit herself, given she had quite the loaded schedule, far fuller and more eventful than any of them imagined.

“A little bird told me graphic design is ending next year and Jeffrey has nowhere to go,” she said as part of her greeting at their doorstep.

“It's true,” he replied with a sigh and a shrug of the shoulders.

When she and the Kingfishers went home for Christmas, Sierra and Jeff stayed in Missoula and let the snow fall over them. The lights went up all around the city, from the red and green lights around the rafters of the wooden suspension bridge going in to the white snowflakes suspended from the light poles. Unlike winters in Big Sandy, the bitter cold of the Arctic settled over the valley and remained there. On Christmas Eve, the two of them went out for a walk through the frigid neighborhood, wrapped up in their heavy dark peacoats and knit scarves. Jeff peered up at the snowflake suspended from the next light pole up; Sierra followed his gaze onto the twinkling white lights around the six points making up the shape of the flake. Twinkling in spite of the amber light of the street lamp.

“I'm thinking Seattle, Washington,” he said once they reached the corner. “Kinda far, but I'll go there.”

“Why Seattle? What's there?” she asked him as a shiver shot up her spine; she huddled closer to him.

“Coffee and rain—Hendrix and Heart are both from there. But it's kind of a blank slate otherwise. Good place to start up stuff like a band or an art gallery. I was thinking New York for a couple of days, but Seattle's closer, though.”

He gazed up at the rich royal blue sky, which darkened with the setting sun and the incoming cold for the night. She stared off to the mountains to the east and the sight of the dark storm clouds rising over the peaks of the Rocky Mountains. They fell back into silence, that is until they returned to the apartment. She flashed a wink at Bebe, who was walking the other way to her apartment with a little black and orange wreath for her door in her hands.

Once they were back inside, Jeff peeled off his coat and hung it up on the hook next to the door. He ducked into the kitchen for one of the thin paint brushes and that cold cobalt blue watercolor paint, that same shade of blue he had lent her that day in elementary art class, the same shade of blue as the evening sky outside. She watched him put down paint at the roots of her hair.

“Oh, so we're going for a psychedelic look?” she asked him; she couldn't resist the grin on her face. Once he had put down paint for the roots for her hair, he handed her the brush. She dipped the bristles into the paint and stroked along the roots of his hair.

He hummed “Goodbye Blue Sky” to himself as he watched her dabble over the crown of his head. She cleaned off the brush under the faucet next to them and then set it down on the counter to let it dry. She was about to take off her coat when he put his arms around her and planted a kiss on her lips.

It was that night that started a pattern which carried throughout the rest of the school year. An evening walk when the weather permitted and then a return to the apartment for a bit of watercolor on what they deemed the travelling painting. Little by little, the painting came together in what he called “an exquisite corpse.” It was when they reached the last remaining touches of yellow by finals week in June when he finally followed up the kiss with something else. He hung before her face with his eyes closed and a slight break to his voice.

She knew the end was coming within a matter of days, and it was hearing his voice that assured her that Seattle propped itself in her windshield.

“I'll call you when I get there,” he promised her. “Don't do anything I wouldn't do, and if you do, name it after me.”


	24. the open road

It was following the last day of school when Jeff packed up the painting: he had stretched it over a piece of canvas so as to keep the paper from crinkling and slipped it into a cardboard tube, which he vowed to sling over his shoulder every day until he found a place to call it home. Every so often, Sierra gazed over at the tube leaning against the wall next to the front door. She didn't want to let go of that tube and let it go to Seattle.

Reality sank in within the last two weeks of June. Jeff was leaving that night. She was already missing the aroma of his cologne in junction with his shampoo, and she was already missing that fuzz surrounding his bass tone; indeed, she woke up one cloudy morning to the sound of him playing his bass at a slow pace. She gazed up at the ceiling and fondled the space of the bed sheet right next to her.

The fuzz coupled with the slow deep monotone made her think of that painting even more. All the shades of that steely rich blue coalescing with the slowness and sweetness out there. It almost sounded as though he was trying to play a bass without frets.

She climbed out of bed and ran her fingers through her dark hair in repose. She realized he was playing at a methodical pace. Not an improvisation.

She ambled out of the room in nothing more than her camisole and her panties and stood at the doorway of the living room to see him there on the sofa. His fingers swept over the fret board on the neck; he used two fingers for the strings near the pick guard.

He glanced up at her with a curious look upon his face.

“'Morning,” he greeted her with a twinkle in his eye.

“'Morning,” she echoed him as she ambled over to him. He inched over to the side to let her have a seat.

“Can you play something for me?” she asked him.

“Funny you ask because I was wanting to play something for you when you got up,” he admitted.

“Oh?”

“This is actually a song I wrote the other day,” he told her. “It's called 'Nothing As It Seems.'”

The bass droned out with that low guttural tone. She watched his fingers glide over the fret board; they glided about as if he was stroking the shape of her body.

“This is something I feel like I should play on a fretless,” he confessed as he plucked at the pick guard a bit.

“It's alright,” she assured him.

He cleared his throat and closed his eyes.

“ _Don't feel like home, ease a little out_ ,” he sang in a soft, low voice. “ _And all these words alone… is nothing like a poem. Putting in, inputting in… don't feel like methadone_.” A full feeling emerged in the middle of Sierra's throat at the scratchy tone of his voice. “ _A scratching voice all alone is nothing like your baritone. It's nothing as it seems… the little that he needs, it's home. The little that he sees is nothing he concedes… it's home_.”

He raised his gaze to her face. She put an arm around him and pressed her lips to his.

“I'm gonna miss you so much,” she whispered.

“Don't change the number,” he breathed. “Please don't change the phone number.”

“I won't,” she vowed; there was a part of her that wanted her to follow him out to Seattle, but she had to tend to her own studies. She had to stay there to let him go his own way.

Indeed, that evening, as Zero, Roz, and Bebe joined her in biding him farewell, they gazed on at the highway leading out of Missoula into the hills to the west. The way out of that hole in the Rocky Mountains.

“There's the open road,” Bebe remarked as Jeff slung the tube over his shoulder.

“A road that I hope you ladies find your way down,” he told them as he put his arms around her.

“You still have our number?” Zero asked him as she embraced him.

“Always,” he assured her; he put his arms around Roz, who closed her eyes when she rested her chin on his shoulder. He then turned to Sierra, whose eyes burned with tears.

“I'll see you again,” he vowed. “I promise.”

“I'll find my way there,” she promised him.

“You don't have to,” he said. “I mean it. Stay here and take care of these three for me.” He pressed his lips to hers again: there had been a multitude of kisses before then, but this one was the best out of all of them to that point. He gazed into her eyes: she could see the tears brimming on his eyelashes. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hands as he stepped towards his car. She eyed the bracelet that Roz had given him: he was always going to wear it no matter where he went, much like how she was going to wear the arrowhead no matter what. They watched him climb into the car and begin down that open road.

Hundreds of miles, all by himself.

Granted he told her to stay there in Missoula, but Sierra wanted to leave for Seattle herself. Whether it was within a month or ten years, she needed to be there.


	25. sunflowers and coffee

It was so strange to wake up in the mornings following that night and not hear the fuzz of Jeff's bass in the next room, or even so much as feel him next to her. It was strange to feel it at first, but by the time school started in late September, Sierra found herself acquainting to the void he had left behind. She yearned to hear the phone ring and hear his voice on the other end—she knew he would call at some point. But it would be nice to hear something, anything, instead of taking day by day, step by step, and wondering if things are alright on his end.

To think her best friend was out there somewhere in the great wide unknown, all by his lonesome.

If only she knew where in Seattle he had run off to then she could find him and have coffee together. Rich authentic coffee from a city garnering attention for its own brand of coffee.

She stayed in Missoula for Thanksgiving and Christmas again, but that time around with Bebe, Roz, and Zero. It was always good fun to have the three of them there with her, especially when they dished about a few guys at school and something hilarious that happened in Zero's two o'clock class while eating grasshopper pie, but she couldn't help but feel something was missing.

They were missing his sparkling eyes and that charming smile. That bold laugh. That distorted fuzz riding all around the taut thick strings with his harder and faster bass playing.

She had just been getting to know Jeff and he wound up having to leave.

There was so much more to him and she itched to know more: to stride down another corridor of his personality, especially the real private parts.

She did find a glimpse into him through painting, but the arts needed some extra thinking and some extra input to uncover anything with him. All she could do was doodle in the margins in her notebooks whenever she could steal a moment during class.

That winter was cold and quiet, but it helped that she had more classes that quarter. And yet she couldn't help but find everything around her reminding her of him, all the way down to the sound of Free's “Wishing Well” playing on her car radio one day on a trip up to Flathead Lake by herself.

In fact, she heard “Wishing Well” a few times in a single week, such that it made her wonder.

What was happening?

Sierra walked into the apartment one overcast morning to catch the phone ringing. She ambled over to it there on the wall and picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Sierra.”

She gasped at the sound of his voice.

“Surprised?”

“Um—” She almost gagged on her own oxygen. “—yes! Yes? Uh—um, how are you? How is everything? How's Seattle?”

“Oh, Seattle's gorgeous. You'd love it here. It's raining right now and I'm sittin' here with a cup of coffee and waitin' for my roomie to show up with breakfast.”

“Y-You found a place?” she stammered.

“Yeah! Took me long enough, too. Finally landed a job here and I was kinda freakin' out a bit back around Thanksgiving because the place I was stayin' in closed down. But luckily, I made a friend real quick and he's been letting me stay with him since then. Thank you for keeping the number, too.”

“Well, of course. I would never break a promise like that, especially to you.”

He chuckled at that; she heard him take a sip from his mug. She thought about the promise she had made to herself, to travel over there at some point and at the very least visit him.

“Oh! Before I forget—I broke down the other day, and by that, I mean I shelled out a bit of money, for a little sump'n for you. Like a 'hey, babe, I made it!' That sort of thing. It should be there—”

A knock on the door caught her attention.

“Hang on a second,” she quipped. She set the phone down on the counter next to her and hurried to the door, where she was greeted by a post man holding a bouquet of bright yellow sunflowers in one arm and a card in his other hand.

“Got an order of flowers for a Sierra Roseburg?” he read her name aloud.

“That's me!” she declared, bedazzled by the sheer sight of the flowers. He handed her the bouquet with a beaming smile, to which she thanked him. She took a whiff of them even with the subtle scent. The petals stood out from the rouse of near black seeds, all bright yellow and bold like the brightest sunshine following the cloudiest day in Seattle. The thick green stems were strong and stout even from being in that truck for a little while: he must've ordered them from the florist there in Missoula. 

She checked the tag on the base of the wrapping paper holding the bouquet together, to which it read “to Sierra, love Jeff.”

Slightly overwhelmed, she returned to the phone while cradling the bouquet in one arm. She picked up the receiver as her heart fluttered in her chest.

“Are you there?” she asked him.

“Never left, but my roomie just walked in, though—hang tight, Stone, I'll be right there.”

“These flowers are so beautiful,” she said in a soft airy voice. “I'm just—beside myself.”

“I thought you'd like 'em,” he assured her; she pictured him winking at her.

“Will I see you again?” she asked him as she felt the tears well up.

“Of course. After growing up in a Podunk town like Big Sandy, I know we'll always find a way to see each other. Give Bebe and the Kingfishers all my love.”

He puckered his lips on his end as if giving her a kiss and she did the same for him. They hung up at the same time, and she stood there in the kitchen with the flowers cradled in her one arm.

“I better find a vase for these,” she muttered to herself as she stroked the thick stems some more.


	26. road trip to seattle

It would be some time before Sierra could find the time and the money to begin to find her way to the Pacific Northwest. Little by little with those stray pieces of money whenever she even so much as broke a dollar, she saved for a road trip over to the Seattle area. It took her all winter term, but she managed to garner a healthy amount of money to pay for the trip. She figured that, since spring break took a whole week, she would leave that Sunday night and return that following Saturday night so she could have a single day to herself before spring term began that Monday.

It was going to be a long ride going out there by herself and thus she made a reminder to herself to ask Bebe and the Kingfishers to come with her. Jeff eventually gave her the address to the apartment which he and his roommate lived in, his roommate who called himself Stone. She soon found out he lived on the outskirts of town, down by the waters.

It was the Friday before finals week and then spring break when she finally caught up with Roz after their three o'clock class. She greeted her with a twinkle in her eye and a smile on her face.

“Hey, Sierra!” she said as they walked side by side to the front door of the building. “I've been meaning to ask if you're doing anything for Easter break.”

“I'm taking a road trip out to the Pacific Northwest to visit Jeff,” Sierra answered in a single breath.

“Wow, really?” Roz raised her dark eyebrows at that.

“Really. And I was going to ask if you and Zero are doing anything then, too.”

“Probably nuthin'. Bebe's going down to Cheyenne to interview for probably a new job, I think. Zero has a hockey game on Saturday but that's about it. We might just hang out and watch TV all week.”

“You know, Rosalind, it's an awful long drive,” Sierra pointed out as she adjusted the strap on her purse. “Someone in the library told me it's almost five hundred miles, about seven hours on the road without stopping. I hate to go all that way by myself. And after hearing that, I don't really want you guys to be bored out of your wits.”

Roz showed her a thoughtful grin: her brown eyes were soft and her dark skin was radiant even with the gray cold rain outside of the school.

“When are you leaving?” she asked Sierra.

“Sunday. Coming back that following Saturday, too. So after Zero's hockey game.”

“I'll run it by her,” Roz assured her with a flip of her black hair.

Indeed, come the end of finals week, Sierra and the Kingfishers began loading up the former's car for the long ride across the five hundred mile plain from the base of the Rockies to the base of the Cascade Range. Sierra decided to leave Missoula early in the morning thus they would reach Seattle come dinner time. On that day of the trip, a beautiful clear morning there in western Montana, Zero wore her hockey jersey and kept her stick slung over her shoulder even as she slipped into the back seat of the car behind Roz and Sierra.

“I still can't believe we lost last night,” she began in a broken voice.

“I thought for sure you guys had it in the bag!” Sierra proclaimed with a peek at her through the rear view mirror.

“We all did. Helena just came alive in the last period there big time—the best part was the pratfall their arrogant goalie did. She kept mocking me and the way I skate, so it satisfying to see.” She peered out the passenger window. “Alright, sister—we're waiting on you. Roz thinks it's because Bebe wasn't there. Every game I've ever had, she was there. And I mean every game, too. Since we were living in Big Sandy. She's like the proverbial good luck charm…” Her voice trailed off.

“Here she comes—” Sierra pointed out.

Roz appeared from behind the apartment building wrapped in a bright yellow sundress, her sunglasses upon her face, and with her purse slung over her shoulder. She fumbled the house keys a bit before she slid into the front seat next to Sierra.

“Let's roll,” she commanded with that thoughtful smile returning to her face again.

They scoured the vast wilderness and that lonely road winding its way through the low hills and the one sliver of lush green making up the panhandle of Idaho. Zero made a joke about the outside of the car smelling like potatoes when they stopped in Spokane for lunch.

“You're just hungry, aren't you?” Roz teased her as they padded into the front of the little roadside cafe.

“Oh, come on, sis, I'm a hockey player—you know I'm always hungry!”

Where they were in droves of green in Montana and Idaho, western Washington stretched with near bare landscape that went on for miles. No interesting bends in the road, save for the view of the snow capped monolith of Mount Rainier off in the distance: every mile, it seemed to grow bigger and bigger and more foreboding. At one point, Zero began singing to herself.

Sierra peeked into the rear view mirror to perhaps read her lips but she couldn't tell what she was singing.  
“Care to share, Zero?” she called back over the noise of the road.

“ _Higher—to the highest—mountain in the distance—keeps growing bigger to the point of where we're fearless_ ,” Zero sang in a shaky but full voice. Roz raised her eyebrows at that.

“Wow,” she remarked.

“Yeah—I didn't know you sang,” Sierra followed up as she pushed her sunglasses up the bridge of her nose.

“Just to myself in the shower and in the locker room. Nothin' fancy.”

Within time, they reached Ellensburg, the last stop on the eastern side of the Cascades; and the sight of the clouds on the other side meant they were getting close. Sierra could already feel the butterflies inside of her stomach as they scoured the low lush green hills to the east of Seattle. Mount Rainier at that point was massive as it loomed off to their left, a hulking giant accompanied with a thick permanent blanket of snow all around it. To think Mount St. Helens to the south of them erupted not even the year before. But she was fixated on the sight before her: the low valley hugging the cold dark waters of the Puget Sound which in turn was cradled by the high rising mountains of the Olympic Peninsula. Everything was a bright and healthy shade of green, even with the burgeoning darkness of the sky overhead.

Sierra removed her sunglasses and gazed out the windshield in awe of the city before them. He had moved here, and she found herself in love with this city already as she spotted the towering point of the Space Needle near the edge of the waters.

“I'm going to move here,” she muttered to herself over the noise of the road, “whether anyone likes it or not.”


	27. the roommate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _"Why is the bedroom so cold?  
>  Turned away on your side,  
> is my timing that flawed?  
> Our respect run so dry?  
> Yet there's still this appeal  
> that we've kept through our lives."_  
> -"Love Will Tear Us Apart", Joy Division

Dark gray feathery wisps of rain cloud crossed the sky overhead as Sierra and the Kingfishers made their way over to the western side of Seattle; she knew they had arrived just in time and she hoped that she and the Kingfishers could take Jeff and his roommate out to dinner if they wished. Even driving through the heart of Seattle, and peering out the windshield, she wondered they would even go that evening. It was bit of a buttoned down small city spiraled out from the base of the tall off white Space Needle, the prominent part of an otherwise low skyline of apartment buildings and a few offices; the western side meanwhile was lined by the rich cold dark waters of the Puget Sound. As they came within range of the western neighborhood, Sierra spotted the sight of a curtain of wispy white fog billowing off of the waters. The fog wasn't thick enough to obscure their sight, or the reflection of Mount Rainier in their rear view mirrors for that matter.

“So, where to?” Roz asked her as she took off her sunglasses and gave her black hair a good little shake about.

“Let's see... if I remember correctly, he said their place is looking over the water—he said it to me pretty quickly and I repeated it to myself a few times so I could remember it.” She peered about the block for the loft he had told her about before hand.

There was one at the very end of the street, right before a stretch of grass and the surface of the waters, and she wondered if that was it right there. She gazed on at the sight of the wrought iron porch light next to the door frame: there was still a bit of daylight around them which made the golden light on the inside of the lamp appear small and dim. Sierra couldn't recall exactly what he had said to her over the phone pertaining to what the loft looked like. But as she hesitated before the front of that particular soft blue building and gazed up at the front door, it swung open and Jeff's head poked out from the inside there. He had on a knit cap atop the crown of feathery long hair and a knit scarf wrapped around his neck. He recognized Roz and Zero in the seats of the car and his face lit up.

Sierra tugged on the parking lever and switched off the engine. The three of them climbed out at the same time into the cool damp evening: cool and damp in comparison to the dry bitter cold of western Montana. Zero shivered from the feeling of the breeze from the Puget Sound and put her hands on her upper arms given the only thing she wore was her hockey jersey.

Sierra slung her purse over her shoulder and shivered as she met up with the Kingfishers on the other side of the car. The three of them padded up the walkway towards the front door and Jeff, wrapped up in those knit clothes as if it was winter time.

“I was hoping when you ladies'd show up,” he admitted to them as part of his greeting. He put his arms around Roz and then did the same with Sierra, whom of which he gave a kiss to. An open lipped kiss on the mouth, much to her surprise.

“Anyways, c'mon in,” he beckoned them after he embraced Zero and beckoned them inside.

The loft was a bit larger on the inside compared to the soft blue exterior. Zero and Roz both removed their shoes before they strode over the soft blue shag carpet to the small bright lit kitchen. Sierra took off her shoes as well and almost lost her balance as she stepped in right behind them. They were met with the young man at the counter next to the sink. He had a little incoming mop of mousy brown hair atop his head and a very handsome, very soft face with gentle features. He looked small in comparison to Jeff, and it didn't help matters he was sitting down on a spindly bar stool: he looked so minute and stubby even compared to the Kingfishers.

“Ladies, this is my roommate Stone,” Jeff introduced them. “He and I are playing in a band together at the moment.”

Stone brushed the curled lock of hair on his forehead to the side with a flick of a finger before he stood to his feet. He showed them a warm smile as he approached them.

“So which one of ya's the girl in question?” he asked them with his hands stuffed in his pockets.

“Sierra?” Roz showed him a sweet little smile.

“Right here!” Sierra declared as she rounded Zero's right side so he could see her.

“Ah, yes!” Stone replied with a twinkle in his eye. “I've heard so much about you.”

“Me, and not the two of them here?”

“Unless there were two clones of ya Jeffrey here didn't tell me about,” he said without missing a beat, to which Roz and Zero giggled in unison.

“So, it's getting to around dinner time,” Sierra started again, “shall we go out to dinner or eat in tonight?”

“Well, if we're going out to eat, I'd haveta change my clothes,” Jeff pointed out with a slight grin on his face.

“Not a problem,” she concluded with a shake of her head and a grin on her face as well.

“How 'bout you, Stone?” Jeff asked him.

“What, with clothes? I think I might wanna take 'em off for these three fine lookin' brunettes here if I'm honest.” Roz and Zero giggled again. Jeff then snuck over to Sierra and leaned into her ear.

“I'll be right back,” he whispered to her.

“Okay.”

He ducked back into the short hallway to his room. Roz and Zero started to talk about something. Stone turned to her there still with a sly look on his face. Sierra showed him a sweet smile in return.

“I want to move here,” she said to him in a low voice. He raised his eyebrows at that.

“Oh? When do you wanna do that?”

“I don't know. I'm still in school back home in Montana so it's not like I can come here right away.”

“Well... I hope you can,” he confessed to her. “I've heard so much about you and I know Jeff would love to have you here with him. Y'know, like his face lights up whenever he talks about you.”

“We've known each other since we were kids,” she explained.

Roz giggled about something, to which Stone showed her a grin.

“I hope you can,” he repeated to Sierra in a delicate whisper. “I hope these ladies can, too.”

It was that point Sierra figured she would plan her move to the Pacific Northwest, and yet she wondered if the Kingfishers, or Bebe for that matter, wanted to move with her as well. She would have to risk leaving them in Montana if that was what it came to.


	28. an evening in seattle

Sierra's memory faded out a bit pertaining to their evening out together with Stone, but she did recall his growing friendly with the Kingfishers in particular.

Jeff had changed his clothes into something a little less buttoned back and a little more relaxed. She had offered to take them into the heart of downtown, down by the Space Needle, especially after Stone told her about a Mexican restaurant called Mama's. She even added she was paying for it all.

She sat next to Jeff at the counter, while Stone nestled himself in between Jeff and the Kingfishers.

For a second, she forgot they weren't underage anymore. But then he offered to buy her a margarita with the salt around the rim of the glass. She held the glass in one hand and ate a few tortilla chips to accompany it. He adjusted the rim of his hat before he offered her a toast with her glass.

Stone cracked a joke to Zero which made her laugh. It was just the five of them there in that Mexican restaurant—just the five of them there granted it was a little late at that point and the incoming rains pushed everyone back into shelter. The five of them stayed in their seats in those low bar stools for a few hours, all the way until closing time. They had eaten a great deal of food, such that Sierra wondered if she would have enough money with her on the trip back to Missoula. And yet there was a voice in the back of her mind that told her not to worry about that.

Looking back on it, she thought about the conversation the five of them had there at the counter. Just talking about Seattle and the upcoming music scene there, or a patchwork scene as Roz described it given there were clusters of bands in west Seattle with a whole lot of nothing that extended as far south as Olympia and as far out east as Ellensburg. A whole lot of noise followed by a whole lot of nothing, like a patchwork quilt.

“And yet, we're all friendly with each other,” Jeff pointed out as he topped off the rest of his margarita. “It's how I met this guy here and it's how I landed a bass playing gig with our band.”

“What are you guys called, by the way?” Sierra asked him once she wiped her mouth and set down the cloth napkin next to the edge of the plate.

“Green River. We're named after a serial killer—it's kinda funny 'cause a bunch of people thought we named ourselves after the CCR song.”

Stone had brought an umbrella along with him to which he opened to protect Roz and Zero's heads with; Jeff on the other hand put his arm around Sierra and lifted up the side of his coat to protect the back of her head as they made their way back to Stone's car.

“Shotgun,” Zero declared once the passenger door came within view.

“Damn it!” Stone griped but he followed it up with a laugh. He handed the umbrella to Roz who held it out for Jeff and Sierra.

“Do you feel full at all?” Sierra asked her over the pattering of the rain around them.

Roz hesitated after she clicked the button on the hook part of the umbrella.

“Not at all,” she confessed. “It's almost like we didn't anything at all—even though we ate a bunch.”

“Our attention was taken off of the food,” Stone explained as he slid into the back seat. “It happened to Jeff and me when we went out to eat with Green River the first time.”

Sierra recalled their returning to the loft within time and their offering the three girls to bunk in the spare room there at the back of the loft.

And she did recall the painting Jeff had made for her and showed to her once they had returned there. She went to great pains to protecting it before they returned to Missoula as it reminded her of the sketchy drawing of her and him enjoying a kiss together.

It was a painting on a black canvas, a bright colored painting of their silhouettes against the low rising Seattle skyline and the hulking snow-capped monolith of Mount Rainier. He titled it “someday, an evening in Seattle.”

She noticed they were holding hands there, even after all this time and not seeing it the first time around. He had used a small paint brush to paint their hands linked together in between each other's bodies. So subtle and small of a detail that she couldn't stop seeing it once she took it out of its hiding place there behind the shelf.

It was the moment Jeff had shown her the painting from his desk before they turned in for the night that she could make her dreams come true. Her dream of being an artist with her best friend. Such a subtle little detail, even with her money being eaten away during the entirety of the trip, and yet it was all she needed to motivate her.


	29. the art gallery

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _"I'm only happy when it rains,  
>  I'm only happy when it's complicated.  
> And though I know you can't appreciate it,  
> I'm only happy when it rains."_  
> -"Only Happy When It Rains", Garbage

There was this art gallery down in Tacoma which Stone had told Sierra and the Kingfishers about the third day they were there in Seattle. He promised to take them to it when it opened during public hours in the afternoon—it was just a matter of climbing into the car in time and heading on down the freeway towards that end of the Puget Sound. Jeff and Stone were almost like full fledged slackers, “hard working” slackers as the latter put it.

They played in a band together and made their way there in the heart of Seattle and yet they wanted to hang out with these three girls. Just chill and take walks throughout this cute little neighborhood which they had claimed as home. Sierra was positive Stone liked Zero in particular, even though he often gave Roz those “knowing” glances which she was so familiar with around Jeff. As for Jeff, she never saw him happier there in Seattle, even though she knew he missed her presence. If anything, she itched to draw or make him something while they were there in the loft with them. She wanted to absorb his happiness and transmutate it onto paper.

The day before Stone took the three girls down to Tacoma, she had woke up early, before the four of them did. She took her seat there at the kitchen table with a blank page of paper and a good pencil and began sketching. It resembled to the proverbial itch she couldn't scratch: she wanted to draw but nothing resided on the page before her. The blank off white smooth grains taunted back at her.

A mark here, a mark there, nothing.

She was careful with that kneaded gray eraser so as to ensure the paper would remain intact. And yet, she couldn't help but sit there with one elbow rested upon the surface of the table and her gaze fixed on the paper before her.

Stone strolled into the room right then with his fine hair disheveled and his eyes clear and refreshed looking.

“'Morning, Sierra,” he greeted her.

“'Morning, Stone,” she replied with a less than enthusiastic tone to her voice.

“What's wrong?” He took a seat next to her.

“I feel like I'm plateauing,” she confessed. “I feel like I've been plateauing for a while now.”

“Jeff doesn't think you are,” he said, nonplussed. “He says you're like a well of creativity for him, even hundreds of miles away.”

“I dunno, though—” She sighed through her nose and kept gazing upon the paper before her. Stone smacked his lips and gave his little head of hair a slight toss.

“Tell ya what,” he began, “let's see... what time is it?” He craned his neck for a look at the clock on the microwave. “Ten after eight? I'm gonna put on a pot of coffee and then we'll boogie outta here and go downta Tacoma in a couple of hours. You're gonna love it there—it's mostly a glass place.”

“Why do you say that?” she asked him with her eyebrows knitted together. “Well, I know what you're intending here.”

“Sometimes, when I have creator's block, I expose myself to other people's art or music. It happens to me all the time when I feel like I can't write lyrics.”

“Something tells me you and Jeff have been bouncing ideas off one another for a bit now,” she teased him with a smirk upon her face.

“From day one,” he replied. “It was almost like we were meant to cross paths with another, kinda like how you and him were meant to cross paths with one another there in Big Sandy.”

Sierra showed him a kind smile as he stood to his feet and made his way over to the coffee maker to brew a fresh pot. She never did start the drawing, even as Jeff and the Kingfishers awoke and joined them for breakfast. Jeff kissed her good morning and then huddled next to her at the table as they enjoyed a round of pancakes and little white mugs of fresh dark coffee. She dared not tell him about the drawing she wanted to make for him, especially when he awoke, she slipped into the back room and hid the drawing pad in her purse.

Within time, they were all dressed and thus piled into the car and drove on down the four lane freeway through downtown towards Tacoma: the sky overhead was painted several shades of gray from the clouds and the rain, and yet everything felt so fresh and clean. When Zero stepped outside of the loft, she tilted her head back, closed her eyes, and took in a deep breath through her nose at the fresh spring misty rain around them.

Tacoma was a buttoned down little town at the small point of the Puget Sound, right within the line of sight of Mount Rainier, even though it and those bright white glaciers faded back into the rain clouds. Stone guided Jeff through the trees and the cute little neighborhoods, and within time they reached the gallery in question: a low white plain looking building with large bay windows out front peering out to the street behind them.

The five of them climbed out and made their way towards the front doors: Jeff held the door for Sierra, and then Roz and Zero, the latter of whom almost dropped her purse once they were inside of the gallery. She caught it before it hit the floor but her sunglasses fell out of them. A boy with shoulder length hair inside there picked them up for her.

“Aw, thank you so much!” she declared.

“You don't wanna lose those,” he told her; she stared into his big brown eyes and his round face. It was like a more pale version of herself, and albeit with lighter hair. She grinned at him even as Stone showed Roz and Sierra a ruffled piece on the wall before them: it resembled to a lotus flower, with its lacy white petals sprawled out from the pink and orange fused glass stamens.

“Wow, is that glass?” Sierra asked him.

“It sure is!” he declared. Roz meanwhile peered over her shoulder at Jeff as he examined a series of glass bowls on the shelf before him. Sierra followed her gaze over to him as well as Zero talking to the boy near the door.

“I'm Mike,” he introduced himself to her, and she blushed, a much more luscious pink blush than Sierra had ever seen on her.

“I'm Violet,” she replied, “but I go by Zero.”

“Why Zero?”

She shrugged and nodded her head from side to side.

“It's complicated,” she confessed as she tucked her sunglasses back into her purse, and then slung her purse back over her shoulder.

Even as Stone showed them the art glass pieces, Sierra was mostly fascinated by the sight of the pieces of glass jewelry at the far end of the room. So simple and yet so perfect for a girl coming of age with her best friends. He didn't have much money on hand but Jeff managed to buy her a speckled bracelet. In fact, Stone bought Roz a bracelet, and that other boy, Mike, was kind enough to offer something to Zero even with them having met each other. Indeed, looking at some of the pieces, in particular the one that resembled an orchid, gave Sierra an idea, and granted one that she had to repeat to herself several times on the way back to the loft lest she forgot about it.


	30. green river and malfunkshun

On the next to last day there in Seattle, Jeff and Stone treated the girls to a show, but not just any old show. The former slung his bright colored bass guitar over his shoulder while the latter picked up a beat up looking six string guitar and held it before his slender body.

Sierra and the Kingfishers found themselves in the hot seat of a tiny dim lit club called the Showbox, brought on a whim and a wink and a promise; on the way there, Jeff was eager to tell the three of them about how he had joined Green River at the utmost right time.

“The three of them wanted me and Stone both in time for their first demo,” he had said on the drive there. “I didn't tell you ladies this, but when I initially moved here, I was in a band called Deranged Diction. They broke up and then not even a day later, the guy—Mark is his name, Mark Arm, called me up and asked me to join his and Steve Turner's band Green River.”

“I was in a band called March of Crimes,” Stone added from the front seat, “and then those cats picked me up just in time for the first demo.”

“What happened?” Sierra asked him.

“I got fired. Petty nonsense with the ring leader, Ben—Ben Shepherd is his name. But, it's water under the bridge at this point, though. I'm with these guys now and that's all that matters.”

Roz stood in between Zero and Sierra, and the three of them were the only girls in a modest crowd of perhaps fifty people. But they stood there in awe of the five piece band before them. They played as though they were playing at Dodger Stadium: the drummer Alex was quick and strong, with a firm kick of the kick drum to boot. Long haired guitarist Steve played as though he had been doing so for a thousand years. The blond boy at the front, Mark Arm, didn't exactly sing as he did yell, however he didn't seem to care. He did it because he enjoyed it and everyone knew it.

Jeff and Stone meanwhile were as tight as anything with their high and low melodies tightly woven and laced like a filthy but stout tapestry. Sierra could sense the chemistry between them, as if they were meant to play together: she could feel the thunder of his bass inside of her chest and in between her hips. The fuzz around the bass strings took her back to those days in Big Sandy to the point it almost hypnotized her. The amount of overdrive produced a vast wall of sound, just from his bass alone.

At one point, Mark said something about them wanting to play more around Seattle due to the big crowd before them.

“If we do, we get to make an album for you guys!” he declared, and several people behind them erupted into cheers and applause.

“At least that's what we're told,” Steve pointed out as he tuned the keys on the head of his guitar for the next song.

“I hope we can see them again,” Zero confessed as she brought her cup of coffee to her lips.

“I think we will, Zero,” Sierra assured her.

“What makes you say that?” Roz joined in.

“I'm gonna see if I can get a job here.”

“What about us, though?”

Sierra nibbled on her bottom lip as she gazed into her best friends' brown eyes and at their raised eyebrows.

“I'll see if I can get you guys here with me, too,” she assured her as she took a sip of coffee herself.

Green River only played ten songs before they climbed off and cleaned up, and allowed for the next band, Malfunkshun, a trio consisted of black and white Kiss type face paint and alter egos, to take to the tiny shabby stage before them. Within time, Jeff and Stone joined the three girls at the front to watch for themselves.

The blond boy at the front, Andy, who referred to himself as “L'Andrew the Love Child”, cradled a narrow headless little purple bass guitar and sang with such a tender high voice, one reminiscent of the big name glam singers of their high school years. Such a contrast compared to Mark's loud boisterous wail of a voice.

“Jeff and I like these guys,” Stone pointed out to them in a loud enough voice for them to hear. “Two brothers, Andy and Kevin—right here in front of us—and Regan on the drums.”

“Real friendly to the both of us—” But Jeff never finished as Andy ducked down into the crowd right next to them.

“Whoa, hello!” Sierra shrieked as he barreled through the crowd and singing at the top of his lungs. His streaky hair sailed behind his head like the tentacles of an octopus even as he fell out of their line of sight. But he soon returned with a big grin upon his face and his arm extended for high fives from the three girls. Sierra gazed right into his sparkling eyes for only a second, but it was long enough to feel his excitement.

He returned to the stage and gripped onto the microphone.

“This is for all you people!” he exclaimed in a broken but bold voice. “All you people out there right now watching!”

Zero peered over her shoulder and Sierra followed suit; they beheld the sight of the two guys at the back of the room, near the door. And then they grinned at each other.

“When we find the time, we wanna jam with the three of them at some point,” Jeff picked up where he had left off, right into Sierra's ear.

This boy was without question a rock star. With Jeff and Stone adjacent to him, he could go places in the world. They could go places in the world, and she envisioned herself right there by his side in the process.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> suddenly, I have the desire to watch malfunkshun: the andrew wood story again
> 
> xoxoxo


	31. songbirds in seattle, part one

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this while there was in fact a little songbird outside my window💜

As part of breaking her flashback onto the trip to Seattle, Sierra stood to her feet and strode on over to the window and peered out there to those low trees. Each and every one of them fluttered in the soft breeze. She raised her gaze to the horizon beyond the trees. The fuzz of the rain clouds loomed overhead. Far away. So far away.

He was out there somewhere, awaiting her. Her best friend awaiting her.

The memory of the Green River show was so clear and crisp within her memory that she recalled there being another show following that one. Another with Green River themselves as well as Malfunkshun.

What beckoned this memory was in fact the sight of a little songbird perched on the window sill.

She recalled drawing a songbird for the drawing she wanted to give to Jeff just prior to leaving Seattle. She had woken up early, before Stone had the chance to get up and brew some coffee for himself as well as the rest of the apartment. After the initial show, they had made their way to a little art shop for some new wax colored pencils, the kind that spread about the paper with ease. However, she dared not tell Jeff and Stone what she planned to use them for. They were a new medium to her and thus, she asked the black haired clerk at the counter to test them out on a fine grained sheet of paper.

“They blend easily,” she explained as she used the side of the red pencil to show an example, “and the finer paper you're using, the better it can hold onto it. I would also recommend using something like a paper blender or a Q-tip.”

“Oh, yeah, I always use a blender,” Sierra pointed out. “Using your fingers gets kinda messy, you know?”

“Absolutely!”

“So you think maybe these would be good for feathers—?” She hesitated as the clerk hadn't her name tag on.

“Holly,” she replied. “Yeah, if you're going for like a bird in flight or something like that.”

“I like that name, too,” Sierra added.

“My parents said their reasoning was after holly, the actual plant around Christmas time. I always think of Hollywood, though.”

Sierra chuckled at that as she picked out the orange pencil and made a little swatch over the red markings. Holly then reached over for one of those pointed paper blenders and applied it to the wax so as to move it around.

 _A step away from working with watercolors_ , Sierra thought to herself as Holly used the blender to pick up the wax and guide it around the paper. She watched her shape the swatches somewhat into that of a feather. She nodded her head in affirmation and she bought the pencils for a small sum and joined up with Jeff and Stone at the doorway.

She sat at the kitchen table and sketched out a little songbird next to Jeff's head, and she made it look as though he was about to hold the bird on the backs of his fingers. It was in fact a bit of a challenge given she wasn’t so acquainted with such a soft, malleable medium, but the fact she could make the bird’s wings so wispy and ethereal allowed her to wonder what else she use with it.

When she heard two other songbirds in the next room speaking to each other about that boy Mike, she decided to pick things up and draw Jeff himself.


	32. songbirds in seattle, part two

Sierra held back to take a good long look at the drawing before her: a portrait of himself holding his bass while a little red and yellow songbird came fluttering up to his free hand as though it were about to land. Zero strode into the room right then with her jet black hair tousled back behind her head from her shower the night before.

“'Mornin', Sierra,” she greeted her with a yawn.

“'Morning, Zero—” She hesitated at the sight of the drawing upon the table. Her brown eyes lit up at the sight of the drawing.

“Oh, my God, is that for him?”

“Shhhh!” Sierra brought a finger to her lips. And Zero showed her a warm smile. However, it would be some time before she actually gave Jeff the drawing as she never could find a moment to give it to him. It was like growing up in Big Sandy all over again: circumstances kept them apart and she never could find that opportunity. At least this time around they didn't have conservative parents breathing down their necks and forcing them apart from each other.

The last thing they did before leaving the Seattle area was scurry about a clothing shop; Roz found a puffy hat covered in blue and gray velvet and tacked it onto Jeff's head almost a joke. But as Stone stood back and examined the hat for himself and gave him a thumbs-up.

“That—actually looks really good,” he remarked. “Like maybe if Andy wants us to jam together in public, you oughta wear that.”

On the way back to the loft, Stone sang a song to them, to which Jeff joined in. Nonsense for lyrics, as Stone seemed to make them up all on the spot, much like the words for that song Jeff played for Sierra, “Nothing As It Seems.”

“ _Yeah, I'm all over this... I'm out of obsession, over I'll see, I swear, I swear..._ ”

And Jeff burst out into “white punks on dope! White punks on dope!” which coaxed a laugh out of the five of them.

“In all seriousness, though, you oughta share those with Andy when we see him again,” Jeff pointed out.

“Good plan.”

When Sierra and the Kingfishers left Seattle, they each exchanged hugs with Stone and Jeff at the front of the loft, and that gave Sierra herself a chance to give away her drawing. Jeff gasped at the sight of it and even included a hand to his chest as if she had popped the question to him.

“I hope that when things pick up for you guys, that'll serve as some kind of inspiration,” she told him with a shy little smile on her face. “And be careful with that, too—the pencils I used were comprised of a real soft wax and I didn't have any fixative with me.”

Jeff turned to her with his eyebrows raised and his soft hair fluttering in the cool spring breeze.

“I'll protect this with my life,” he vowed and he threw his arms around her. He brushed the side of her face with his lips before he leaned his head into her own.

They held each other for what felt like a hundred years before he stood back and brushed away a tear. He showed Stone the drawing to which he held up a hand for Sierra to give a high five.

Three years ago that happened. Three years marked the last time Sierra and the Kingfishers were in Seattle. Three years and Green River and Malfunkshun had fused into Mother Love Bone, a band which she hoped she could witness for herself, there alongside her best friend.

Meanwhile, back in her reality, she gazed on at the songbird there perched with its wings pressed to its little body. She wondered what had happened to Mother Love Bone and she wondered what she could have done better in those days before then. She gazed at the bird for another minute before it flew away into the incoming rain.

“Fly away, little bird,” she whispered as she turned her attention to the letter on the shelf. The one that told her she was being considered for the job at the gallery in Tacoma. A new job even though she hadn't finished school yet: she still had some credits to fulfill. At least she had her foot in the door at that point.

It was going to be so very real if they called her and gave her the “yes” signal. She was going to have leave home by herself for the time being, but at least she would have Jeff and Stone there with her nearby. She knew she would have her work cut out for her trying to get the Kingfishers out there with her, and it didn't help matters that Bebe was planning on leaving for Cheyenne soon enough. But she would have to put on a brave face and go forth, exactly like how Jeff did when he left Missoula.

She would have to put on a brave face and go forth, even in the wake of a new burgeoning scene there in Seattle, one she wanted to be a part of.

“I'm right behind you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lyrics to Nadine by Brad (RIP Shawn! 💔)


	33. back on the road

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."  
> -Jack Kerouac
> 
> [[x]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7g22JDeuCo)

Sierra adjusted her ponytail, and then picked up her purse and put on her sunglasses. She locked the door behind her and headed out of the apartment, and into the cool crisp Montana morning. It was already quite the long trip, but it was going to be a long trip without the Kingfishers there in the car with her but she knew she would have to entertain herself, just like that little songbird outside of her window.

She knew they weren't awake yet but they knew where she was headed from there on out. Her parents already knew about the new job in Tacoma, as did Bebe, the latter of whom knew about it right before she moved down to Cheyenne. She knew she would have to go at it alone for the time being—the Kingfishers would come next if they wished.

Sierra climbed into the car and set her purse down on the seat next to her. She had already packed up her bag; she adjusted her rear view mirror and spotted it laying there on the back seat right behind her. She drove to the mouth of the driveway.

The suspension bridge soon came within her view. Not a cloud in the sky. All the leaves of the trees fluttered in the morning breeze. She spotted a little brown songbird perched upon the welcome sign on the end of the bridge.

A long day in front of her. A long day and back on the road all alone. But she had Zero's singing stuck in her head as well as Jeff's fuzzy bass.

Three years to the date and she still had their music swirling inside of her. She could still hear Andy Wood singing. She could still hear Mark yelling. The music there in Seattle stuck with her, even after all this time while attending the rest of her tenure at school.

The road wound before her and stretched forth into the five hundred mile terrain. Five hundred miles to Seattle. Five hundred miles back to Stone and Jeff. Five hundred miles felt like those school years and yet, it was all about to come to fruition.

It was almost as if the songbirds were all following her. Every so often as she drove through the lush greenery of western Montana and into Idaho, she would take a peek out the window at the sight of their soft, subtle brown plumage against the blue sky. The time she stopped for fuel in Spokane, she caught the sight of three of them perched on the telephone wire over her head. The midday sun almost made the feathers on their little bodies glow and glisten; their little harmonic voices carried down with the breeze.

She caught a sliver of Free's “Wishing Well” floating off of a nearby car stereo.

What was happening?

She climbed back into the driver's seat and proceeded onward throughout eastern Washington. Vast stretch of empty desert. Stretches of nothing. The wall of noise from the road filled her ears to the point she wished for those little songbirds again. It almost drowned out the sound of her thoughts.

The sun followed her all the way across the terrain, and to the point she was glad she wore baseball sleeves. She sighed through her nose as she spotted one of those mileage signs.

Five hundred miles solo almost felt impossible. Unbearable, even. She wanted Zero in the back seat there singing to herself. She wished for Roz there next to her in the passenger seat. In fact, she wished for Jeff there next to her in the passenger seat.

Her traveling buddy. Her best friend. The road before Ellensburg grew lonesome and empty, especially since she didn't see too many cars on the other side of the road. It was like everyone stayed at home. Stayed at home and left her to her own devices there in her car.

But soon enough, within time, she recognized Mount Rainier as it loomed off in the distance. The pearly white snow cap kissed the late afternoon sky while the hills rose up before her.

Almost there. Just one more time through Ellensburg and just one more time around these hills and she'd be face to face with Seattle itself.

She wriggled her fingers on the rim of the steering wheel to keep the blood flowing. She could hardly contain herself as the road wound up into the eastern side of Seattle.

She caught a sliver of blue waters from the Puget Sound and the rising points of the mountains on the Olympic Peninsula, all of which were painted orange and pink from the setting sun. She was getting close.

She remembered the way to the loft. Almost like clockwork, the mist from the surface of the Puget Sound rose up as she entered that neighborhood. She hoped Stone and Jeff had dinner about to be ready as she pulled up to the curb and tugged on the parking lever.

She slung her purse over her shoulder once she had climbed out. That delicate little harmony caught her ear; she turned her head to the right and spotted a little brown songbird perched on one of the neighbor's mailboxes. A plain looking little bird about the size of a tennis ball singing a little song for the last hours of sunlight.

Sierra strode up to the front step and knocked on the panel three times. Silence. Silence save for the little bird next to her.

And then the door swung open and she was greeted by his beaming smile.

“There's my girl,” Jeff greeted her.


	34. from the porch

“So tell me about your band,” Sierra started as she and Jeff took to their seats on the porch. He was the only one home there in the loft, as Stone had gone into town at some point earlier that day and he still hadn't yet returned. Thus, Jeff had made himself a small pot of coffee, but then she arrived in Seattle, a little exhausted and wanting something with a bit of a punch to it. Therefore, the fresh aroma of brewing coffee filled the cozy area that made up the porch.

The fading sunlight kissed the crown of feathery hair about the top of his head.

“Which one?” he asked her after he took a sip from his cup. “Mother Love Bone or Pearl Jam?”

“How 'bout both?” she suggested.

“Well, let's see—I'm sure you remember Andy. Andy Wood, the boy with the purple bass and the face make up.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“He—had a little trouble with heroin, like shortly after Stone and I took you and the Kingfishers to see them.”

“Oh?” She raised her eyebrows at him in surprise.

“He went into rehab which put Malfunkshun on hold for a time. And then when he got out, he got Stone and me together to jam. We called ourselves 'Lords of the Wasteland' for a time until we decided on Mother Love Bone. It was Andy's idea, if I'm honest.”

He took another sip of coffee before speaking again.

“We made an album.”

Sierra glanced around as though something was about to appear out of thin air before them.

“And where is it?”

“It was—pushed back. Andy took an extra hit back around my birthday, and his girlfriend Xana took him to the hospital—he like a stroke or something and it knocked him out…” His face fell and Sierra put two and two together. She gasped and brought a hand to her mouth.

“Yeah,” he said in a soft voice. The coffee maker let out a soft _ding_ to denote it was finished with the fresh pot, but she waited a moment to climb to her feet so as to process what she was hearing.

“And it's a shame because we all thought we were gonna go places with it,” he continued, still in a soft voice. “Everyone 'round here was hypin' Mother Love Bone as—the next big thing, if you will. Andy was the man. _Apple_ was the album to watch, especially after we put out an EP that everyone 'round here loved. He wanted to be in that spotlight. I mean, you saw him—he owned the spotlight. But—if you ask Stone about it, he'll tell you that his Achilles' heel was himself. The shit that was heroin acted as a crutch. He was his own worst enemy and heroin behaved as the middle man.”

“Wow,” she breathed out with a lowering of her gaze to the floor of the porch.

He took another sip of coffee and leaned back in his chair to soak in the final soft rays of gray sunlight, the soft, sweet smelling breeze from the Puget Sound, and the delicate harmony from the songbirds. Heroin, let alone any sort of drug of that caliber, seemed like such a far away, alien concept to her and here they were, looking at it in hindsight. All of it so complex and so far beyond her reach, that all Sierra could do was get up and fetch a clean mug out of the cupboard.

As she poured herself a cup of coffee, he spoke again through the side doorway there.

“If there's anything that growing up in a small town has taught me, it's that everyone needs to have a place to express themselves, whether it's through art or music or skating.”

“Same here,” she answered as she put back the carafe. “You know I still wanna move here, right?”

“Absolutely!” he declared with a grin. “Stone and I are still hopeful you and the Kingfishers will emigrate here sooner rather than later.”

Once she poured in a bit of cream, she turned to find the grin replaced by a pensive expression on his round boyish face.

“After Andy passed, Stone and I pretty much floundered around in purgatory here all summer. It wasn't until recently we received a tape from a guy when we felt the need to express ourselves again.”

“Oh, like a demo tape?” She brought the big white bone china mug up to her mouth.

“Exactly that!” Jeff replied.

“And?” She lowered the mug a bit.

“Well—the guy who gave it to us—his name is Jack. Jack from the Red Hot Chili Peppers down in LA, sent it to us. He told us it was from this guy down in San Diego, a regular guy all the way down there who was working in a surf shop. Stone has the tape stashed somewhere here—I'll have to ask him about it when he gets back. He like, just came up here to jam with the two of us and also—that kid we met in the art gallery, Mike.”

“Oh, that boy that Zero likes?” she recalled.

“Yeah, that guy! He's a guitar player. We all got together—like just the other day to jam together. He's excellent, like he's been doing it for decades. But you should hear this guy sing, Sierra. It's unreal. Think the most beautiful, soulful artwork you've ever seen in your life and now multiply it by a thousand. That's really the only way I can describe it.”

“What's his name?” she asked.

“Eddie.”


	35. the voice

Stone had returned to the apartment with a sack of French fries and his hair, now grown past his shoulders, ruffled by the cool breeze. He gasped at first but then he grinned at the sight of her.

“Sierra! I thought you weren't gonna be here 'til tomorrow.”

She shrugged and showed him an awkward smile.

“I couldn't resist coming,” she answered with a tucking of her hands into her jeans pockets.

“Oh, yeah?” Stone teased her. “Also, where are the two little birds—I mean, the Kingfisher girls?”

“Back home. I'm hoping—hoping anyways—they'll come with me again when I plan a trip here again. Most of the trip I was missing hearing Zero singing from the backseat.”

“Aw, man!” He held up the brown paper bag of fries. “French fries?”

“Ooh, yes please!”

He set the bag down on the counter top and they were met with that warm fresh aroma of crinkly French fries straight out of a restaurant fryer. Stone turned his head.

“Hey, Jeff, we got any ketchup?”

“I think we do,” Jeff himself replied as he padded into the room with his empty mug, “—I got a bottle the last time I was down the block.” He rinsed out his mug and switched off the faucet when he turned to Stone.

“Show Sierra the tape,” Jeff coaxed him. Stone hesitated for a second; he stood there with a golden crinkled fry in between his index finger and the pad of his thumb. Stiff and crispy with the oils from the fryer and the very aroma itself wafted into the kitchen, and then his face lit up from the memory. He took a bite of the fry first and then using his free hand, he reached up to the bookshelf over the microwave for a little black cassette tape leaned against the wooden wall there.

Stone stuck the rest of the French fry into his mouth and, once he had wiped his fingers on a dish towel, he gestured for Sierra to follow him into the next room. Jeff helped himself to some fries for himself as Stone delved around for the cassette player, which he found behind the lamp next to the couch arm. He inserted the tape and took a seat there on the cushion; Sierra sat down next to him and lingered close to the tape speaker. She caught glimpse of the white stripe along the side of the cassette, the white stripe with a piece of writing upon it reading “momma-son demo, courtesy of E.L. Severson and the help of Jack.”

Stone pressed the play button and swallowed down the French fry.

The sound of a crisp acoustic guitar crackled over the tiny grated speaker there in front of her face. She closed her eyes once she heard the voice.

That low fledgling voice with a slight warble to it. A crooning of sorts. A mourning; the man of the hour mourned over the simple raw piece of music underneath him. The kind of voice that sent a chill up her spine and down her arms.

She parted her lips as he hit a high note. She opened her eyes and turned to Stone, who nodded at her and showed her a knowing smile.

“Oh, my God,” she breathed.

“Unreal, isn't it?” he said in a low enough voice for her to hear him. She returned her attention to the tape and closed her eyes again to relish in the rest of this raw demo here.

Once the tape came to an end, Stone pressed the red stop button and gave his hair a slight toss. Sierra lifted her gaze to find Jeff standing there in the doorway with a small packet of French fries and a small silvery dish of ketchup, the latter of which he set down on the counter so he could eat his fries.

“His name is Eddie, right?” she asked him again.

“Ed,” Stone corrected. “But I think Eddie is acceptable, too.”

“We're gonna be playing with him very soon,” Jeff added as he dipped a fry into the ketchup.

“Do you guys have a name for your little gig?” she asked.

“Mookie Blaylock,” he told her, to which she laughed a bit.

“What? We both think it's a cool name. It's after a basketball player, after all.”

“Maybe drop the Blaylock part,” she suggested. “You guys can just be Mookie.”

“A friend of ours suggested that, too,” Stone recalled as he set the tape on the arm of the couch and ran his fingers through his fine hair.

“Yeah, we feel like it's just gonna be temporary,” Jeff added as he covered his mouth. “If we're going anywhere, we gotta have a name change.”

“You two songbirds chill here for a minute,” Stone excused himself; he climbed to his feet and headed towards the other side of the room.

“Where you goin'?” she asked him.

“Gotta see a man about a horse.”

“I see.”

He padded out of the room, and Sierra scurried over to Jeff to which he raised his eyebrows at her in surprise.

“What's up?”

“I want to be here when it all blows up,” she whispered to him.

“I want you to be here, too,” he whispered back as he dipped a fry into the ketchup. “I want Bebe and the Kingfishers here with you, too. You girls are my friends forever—you've gotta be here when it all goes up.”

He handed her the French fry; a part of her wished it was an onion ring so he could put it over her finger but it would have to do at the moment. She took the fry and he took another one for himself, and they made a toast to one another with the ketchup coated ends. She knew Andy would be the rock star, but this man on the tape would be the star in the sky.

The man from California. The man who was about to serve the position of Andy.


	36. the first show

“So there's gotta be more to this story,” Sierra began with Stone as he walked her into the backstage area.

“What, the story behind the tape?” he asked her with a puzzled look upon his face.

“Yeah.”

“Well—” He peered over his shoulder even though they gathered alone there in that pocket of the backstage area. “—I dunno if Jeff told you this or not, but I wrote the music on that tape. After we demoed it and recorded it—and by we, I mean, me, him, and Mike—we sent it out around to whomever we could find.”

“Including Jack!” she followed along.

“Including Jack, right! And that was how it wound up down in southern California. That was how we all met one another.” He turned to the guitar leaning up against the ramshackle amp on the floor and picked it up, and slung it over his shoulder. He took out the pick from the strings on the neck and strummed it a bit so as to make sure it was at the proper tuning. Once he had it right, he played her a riff from the first song she remembered from the tape.

“So that was you who wrote that guitar work,” she remarked as she adjusted the strap on her purse.

“Yup, and then Jeff and Mike just followed suit with me. The words you heard on there were from Eddie. You know, we did the whole Elton and Bernie thing.”

His voice trailed off and she stood there and watched him play a little bit more so as to get in the mood for the show. At one point, he set his fingers across the fretboard to silence it.

“I should also tell you,” he started, but then he was interrupted by Jeff poking his head out from the curtain behind him.

“Stone?” He whirled around to face him.

“Yeah?”

“We're almost ready.”

“Okay.”

Jeff's face lit up when he recognized her.

“Come on, Sierra! Kelly got you a front row seat on the side of the stage!”

“Oh, boy! I'll be right there.”

He ducked back behind the curtain, which left her to return to Stone for a moment.

“What were you gonna tell me?” she asked him.

“I wrote this song when Andy was still alive,” he finished in a soft voice. “It was initially called 'Dollar Short' and it was gonna be a Mother Love Bone song. In fact—you can quote me on this, too—Andy actually sang on it.”

“So I'm gonna hear—” she began, to which he nodded his head.

“—the ghost of a Mother Love Bone song. Yeah.” He winked at her and shuffled back towards the curtain, and she followed him and their young manager Kelly towards the side of the stage.

Sierra stood on the side of the small stage with her hands stuffed into her jeans pockets. She was about to see them for herself: a thought lingered in the back of her mind that told her to hold off enough steam so as to not get herself too excited. There was the possibility she couldn't come to Seattle and she could perhaps remain in Montana forever, and neither she nor Jeff had any idea if they could keep a long distance friendship in the cards. They missed each other to the point of agony.

Three years. Three years away from each other.

Three years to take time to themselves and yet at the end of it, she wished to be there in the Emerald City with her best friend as he ventured into this new project, this new band. He even whispered to her that he wished for her to join him and the four of them. She missed out on Mother Love Bone and Andy's star power—and yet she could feel it upon listening to _Apple_ the first time. She pictured his long smooth blond hair cascading behind his head, complete with a handful of glitter embedded in the roots and purple tinted glasses courtesy of his grieving girlfriend Xana. At least that was according to Jeff.

It was that one song, “Heartshine”, that made her wonder about her future with him. She imagined Zero singing it, and then she imagined herself singing to Jeff himself at any given point. Since it was only a short time following Andy's death, she knew doing so would coax out a couple of tears from him.

She wondered about the Kingfishers and their future, and she especially wondered about them once she recognized that boy, Mike, taking to the other side of the stage with his guitar. His long smooth hair draped over his shoulders and down onto his chest, such that it obscured most of the soft gray Led Zeppelin logo plastered upon his shirt. He had a faded black hooded sweatshirt tied about his waist: she pictured him giving that sweatshirt to Zero whenever she felt too cold, especially on an evening like this.

Jeff took to the stage with the floppy knit hat Roz had given him atop his head and a pale yellow basketball jersey: his bass guitar seemed a little too big for his body. Stone tossed his fine hair back from the side of his neck and closed his eyes.

And then, there he was.

He loomed at the front and center of the stage with a veil of his hair over his face. His dark denim jacket hugged his little body and his short pants showed off a little bit of skin on his lower legs, right above the hems of his socks and his heavy dark Doc Martens boots. He nudged a piece of hair from his face and gazed out to the small audience of people before them.

“Hey, everyone,” he greeted them in a soft, low voice. “We're Mookie Blaylock—I hope you all like this.”

Mike held up the neck of his guitar and strummed the strings as though they were wind chimes. Sierra held still as he played those opening bars and they sent shivers up her spine and down her arms. Jeff and the drummer, whose name was Dave, dropped the rhythmic notes at the same time, so they hit her right in the chest like a battering ram.

She never expected it to be so loud and heavy at the same time.

The music flowed and ravaged forth like a river, much like the cold waters of Flathead Lake back in Montana. It wound and meandered with such a tight precision like that open highway between Seattle and Missoula.

He brought his mouth to the head of the microphone.

Even with his hair blanketing over his face, she could feel the power and prowess of his voice. So deep and visceral, and so tender and heartfelt, just like on the tape. She gaped at the sight of him there on the front of the stage. Jeff was in the zone. Stone closed his eyes and tilted his head back. Mike seemed to be in a world of his own. And Dave held the whole thing together.

She was in a trance at the sight of them before her.

And then she felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned her head to find Kelly right within the range of her face.

“Hey, miss?” she called out to her.

“Yes?”

“This is for you.” She handed Sierra a small piece of paper.

“Someone called for you and wanted me to relay it to you!” she declared over the roar of the music.

“Thank you!” she replied, and Kelly showed her a smile and a wink. Sierra opened the piece of paper and gasped.

Eddie seemed a little awkward performing before the crowd but they were as entranced as her, especially when he reached the chorus: “hey… I… ohhhh, I'm still alive…”

And yet it felt all the more appropriate for her.

By the third time around, Mike launched into a solo, and they picked up the pace. Eddie stepped back from the crowd and stripped off his jacket and slung it over his shoulder. His hair slid back from his face so as to show off his eyes and his button nose.

The solo only lasted a couple of minutes, but it was to the point, and so to the point that she knew they would go places with it. The ghost of a Mother Love Bone song. A day late, a dollar short, and yet somehow, still alive.

Jeff stumbled towards her with a big grin plastered upon his face.

“Oh, my God, that rocked!” she exclaimed.

“I had a feeling you'd like that!” he said as he flexed his fingers.

“Also, you're gonna love this.”

“What's that?”

She held up the piece of paper.

“I got the job at the gallery,” she told him. He gasped in excitement.

“So you're coming to Seattle?” he asked her with a bit of glee to his voice.

“Yes!” she declared. “Yes! Yes! YES!”

“Oh, fuck yeah!” He threw his arms around her and kissed the side of her neck.

Now, it was just a matter of actually making the big move to Seattle all the way from Missoula.


	37. epilogue

It was a bright and sunny day there in western Montana, a striking contrast from the bitter cold there in the heart of winter time. The sun's rays could not prove to be more perfect for Sierra and the Kingfishers as they kissed their dark heads upon making their way out to the packed car, which Zero had brought around front so they could have easy access. Even by stepping out into the bright, cool morning sunlight, it started to become very surreal for Sierra in particular: she had escaped the small town and found her way back to Jeff in the magnificent Pacific Northwest. The hard part was over: now the only thing that stood in between the three of them was five hundred miles, that open road.

“So how you gonna do this again?” she asked Zero, who shuffled through her purse for her sunglasses.

“Very simple,” she replied, “Mike's gonna let the two of us stay with him for a bit until the both of us get jobs. Thank you for giving me his number, by the way.”

“Well, of course!”

“D'you call Bebe?” asked Roz.

“Yeah, she's gonna come up from Cheyenne in about—I think she said a couple of weeks? She wanted to give us time to get ourselves settled in first.” Zero turned to Sierra as she took out the keys to her old apartment from her jeans pocket, about to hand them in to the landlady.

“When do you start at the gallery?”

“Wednesday,” she answered as she adjusted the clasp on the turquoise and turtle shell bracelet on her wrist, “same reason as Bebe, too.”

“God, everyone in Seattle is so nice,” Roz remarked.

“'Cause we're one of them,” Sierra explained. “We're from the middle of nowhere, and Seattle's kinda middle of nowhere itself, all by its lonesome there in that pocket of Washington. Hang tight, I've gotta hand in my keys…”

“We already did!” Zero declared.

She padded towards the building where the landlady lived and returned the keys to her apartment. It was actually happening. It was about to get real. The only thing that stood in between her and Jeff was five hundred miles. Everything looked so bright and bold, like a gouache painting straight out of an art class.

Once she bode the landlady goodbye, and she returned to the Kingfishers and the car there posted up at the curb, she sighed through her nose. She adjusted the bracelet on her wrist yet again.

Roz hesitated at the doorway of the car with one hand on the edge of the door.

“Never seen that before,” she noted once Sierra entered her view.

“This was a bracelet that Andy gave to Xana, and then when Andy died, she gave it to Jeff, and then he gave it to me before I left,” she explained. “According to him, it was a bracelet that he wore during the recording sessions for _Apple_. So needless, I haven't taken it off because I know it's going to be for good luck.”

“So are we ready?” Zero asked as she put on her sunglasses.

“We are,” Sierra replied as she ran her fingers through her dark hair and rounded the front of the car. The three of them climbed into their seats in unison; Zero was in charge of that stack of old drawings which Sierra had shuffled and looked through: she had tucked them into a bright yellow folder and then tucked them underneath her seat, kept safe by her hockey mask. Sierra then turned to Roz in the front seat next to her. “Shall we proceed forth with a bit of Free in honor of Jeffrey today?”

And she took out the purple disc out from its hiding place.

“We shall,” she announced with a beaming smile on her face.

Without another word, she put on the music and they rolled away from the apartment complex, and they made their way out of Missoula. It took them a full day to reach Seattle and to behold the sight of Mount Rainier and then the Space Needle but they knew they were home upon sight of it all.

They reached the loft, only to find Stone and Jeff weren't home. But they were greeted by a note on the kitchen counter once they had let themselves inside.

“'Gone to see Neil Young, will be back in a couple of hours—love, Stone and Jeff,'” Sierra read aloud. “Well, when did they write this?”

“I was just gonna ask that,” Roz admitted as she set down her purse on the kitchen counter.

“I say we unpack a bit and get ourselves in first,” Zero suggested. “I'm gonna call Mike, then Mom, and then Bebe so they all know we got here in one piece.” She picked up the cordless phone on the wall and dialed Mike's number, which in turn left Sierra and Roz to lug in a few of their suitcases, as well as the drawings and Zero's hockey mask. Once Sierra had tucked the drawings and the mask under her arm and shut the back door, that fine mist from the Puget Sound fell upon the crown of her head.

She hurried up to the front step.

“Hey, what're you doin'?”

She stood on the step and stared out to the darkness to find Stone and Jeff striding up to her with big grins on their faces.

“Hey! How was the show?” she asked them.

“Excellent! Loud as all hell, too,” Jeff answered once they entered within earshot.

“Did you just get here?” Stone filled in.

“We did, yeah. I was just bringing in some old drawings and Zero's mask.”

“Also, you're gonna love this,” Jeff began as the three of them filed into the loft. “You know we were trying to come up names for ourselves, for our new band, and we were running with Mookie Blaylock for a bit. But Kelly told us if we wanted to record an album and go places, we had to change it, you know, ‘cause of legality and whatnot.”

“Right, right—” She shut the door behind her with her hip.

“Well, the other day, like right after you left, Eddie threw out the name 'Pearl' to us, after his grandmother. And we were trying to think of something to go with it. Pearl—Necklace? Pearl—Bracelet?” He eyed the bracelet on her wrist and showed her a little grin.

“So then we saw Neil tonight and his band launched into this big long twenty minute jam session, a la the Grateful Dead or something,” Stone said in a single breath. “And then the two of us look at each other, and Jeff goes, 'jam! Pearl _Jam_! Let's be Pearl Jam!' And I was like 'yes!' So—” He turned his head and peered into the next room, where Zero had taken a seat on the couch so as to speak to Mike.

“—as soon as Zero is done with the phone, I'm gonna call up Ed and Mike and then Kelly and tell them what's up. I can already smell the studio floor.”

“Oh, that's excellent!” she declared and she threw her arms around Jeff, who returned the favor.

“I'm so glad you could be here,” he whispered into her ear. “You and the Kingfishers.”

“Me, too. Bebe's gonna be here soon to visit.” There she was, embracing the boy she had known and loved for so long, ever since that first day of school while they awaited the school bus.

“The distance between us—it was nothing as it seems.”

“Nothing at all,” she said.


End file.
